Panzura is among a small group of vendors with a distributed global file system that combines central cloud-based storage with intelligent, local caching.
Panzura CloudFS is the vendor’s file system. It holds its data set in cloud storage and manages it in a hub, spoke, and mesh architecture with file locking for data consistency.
Global file systems are also sometimes referred to as Cloud NAS, Hybrid Cloud Storage, Cloud Native File Systems, and Distributed Cloud File Systems. These distributed file systems are often used for collaboration between workers in different sites, which increasingly includes home workers.
The CloudFS unified namespace is an in-band file system fabric that consolidates distributed file systems into a single namespace mounted locally on remote virtual machines called Panzura Nodes. CloudFS stores metadata and file data in the cloud while caching and pinning hot data locally to Panzura Nodes. CloudFS synchronizes all Nodes in a namespace simultaneously every 60 seconds. It achieves data consistency through a peer-to-peer exchange of new and changed data and metadata as required.
The cloud forms the hub of the Panzura architecture; each Node is a spoke, while the peer-to-peer connection is the mesh.
Panzura’s global namespace supports NFS and SMB file protocols. CloudFS is compatible with cloud object storage such as AWS S3, Microsoft Azure Blob, Google Cloud Storage, IBM Public Cloud, and Wasabi. It also supports on-premises object storage, including Cloudian, Dell EMC ECS, Hitachi HCP, IBM COS, NetApp StorageGrid, Nutanix Objects, Scality, and Western Digital ActiveScale.
Panzura CloudFS Product Review Includes:
- Overview
- Highlights
- Usage
- Architecture Deployment
- Futurum EvaluScale Product Review Methodology
- The Futurum Group’s Opinion
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