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Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) vs Panzura CloudFS comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on May 18, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
5.8
Amazon EBS offers 20-25% ROI by saving time and resources, enhancing scalability, and eliminating physical disk investments.
Sentiment score
5.1
Organizations experienced enhanced resilience, doubled performance, and productivity gains by adopting Panzura CloudFS, solving past file storage issues.
As a cloud storage option, it is flexible and cost-effective, eliminating the need for a permanent investment in hard disks.
Previously, we had latency issues with syncing up files between offices. Files were not locked, leading to overwrites which cost us literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost time and revenue.
We saw the benefits of Panzura CloudFS immediately because our remote offices were able to share files immediately after the product went live.
Panzura CloudFS saves us a significant amount of time frequently.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.5
Amazon EBS support is generally well-received for responsiveness, despite occasional delays, high costs, and chat issues.
Sentiment score
6.8
Panzura CloudFS support is praised for quick, expert assistance despite occasional delays, receiving high ratings from users.
Enterprise support provides access to AWS developers 24/7.
They provide instant and chat support, addressing concerns in a timely manner.
Once subscribed, the support team is very responsive, connecting remotely to assist with troubleshooting.
The support staff and the number of people they have on staff right now are truly good.
When we have a priority-one issue, we typically receive a call within 20 to 30 minutes.
I would give the support for Panzura CloudFS a ten out of ten because they are responsive and helpful.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.7
Amazon EBS delivers scalability and flexibility, requires manual scaling, supports diverse environments, but lacks auto-scaling for some users.
Sentiment score
6.8
Panzura CloudFS is highly scalable, effortlessly supports many users across locations, with seamless deployment and dedicated support.
Amazon EBS is easy to scale up or down as needed.
Vertical scaling can be achieved by adding additional volumes whenever the created storage is insufficient.
All cloud solutions permit scalability, and this is an important feature.
Unlimited users can access the system without issues.
From our original entry with Panzura CloudFS, we have added an additional seven sites, and deploying those additional nodes was very seamless and did not take any effort.
The latest version, 8.0.2, has better ease of decommissioning filers and bringing new ones online.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Amazon EBS is praised for reliability, ease of use, stable performance, effective replication, and handling increased data loads.
Sentiment score
6.1
Panzura CloudFS is highly stable with rare outages and improved reliability, earning high user ratings overall.
AWS provides infrastructure stability like data centers, ensuring high stability.
I have never had problems with its stability.
If the server is stable, then EBS is stable.
I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.
We have never had their system crash on us.
There were times with file lock issues between filers, causing various anomalies, but with their ongoing development, these issues have improved.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon EBS struggles with latency, cost, complex integration, scalability, encryption, multi-region accessibility, and lacks automation and improved support.
Panzura CloudFS needs improvements in performance, compatibility, pricing, dashboard, alerting, licensing, Active Directory reliance, NFS service, and support.
Regarding EBS, if an instance is terminated, the volume is also deleted, which leads to data loss.
I would like EBS to have no limitations, similar to stream-like block storage, which can accommodate an unlimited amount of sales.
Deployment is not easy as it requires server downtime to map newly created volumes, impacting operations during additional volume additions.
When something goes wrong somewhere, there should be a little bit better alerting with issues before they become a big problem.
The GIS data formats, such as a geo database, have been found better kept outside of Panzura CloudFS.
It would have been nice if they had offered them in increments, of 5, 10, 15, or 20 terabytes than having to get a whole chunk of 25 terabytes again for licensing purposes, which is a little costly.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EBS pricing varies; seen as costly or efficient, it's affected by storage type and appreciated for transparency.
Panzura CloudFS pricing is higher than competitors, lacks granular licenses, but offers negotiation flexibility and transparency.
For SSD IOPS, you only pay $0.125 per gigabyte.
The pay-for-what-you-use model justifies the amount paid, with no extra or hidden charges.
Users are charged only for the data used, not for the allocated volume.
It did require us to purchase new hardware, however, that was not overly expensive.
They should consider more attractive pricing for companies of our size.
Overall, it is quite costly compared to NetApp and similar solutions.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EBS provides scalable, high-performance storage with integration, encryption, and reliability for diverse workload needs.
Panzura CloudFS enhances workflows with high availability, security, and seamless collaboration, reducing storage costs and boosting productivity.
Amazon EBS is also scalable and provides high availability.
EBS provides vertical scaling options to add additional volumes when more storage is required.
Amazon EBS allows seamless changes to the instance type without affecting application availability.
It is very reliable and very quick.
It helps us increase network resilience. We have a primary object library stored in the cloud and have Panzura Mirroring which allows us to place data in a secondary cloud for added resiliency.
There is no degradation of speed because these filers have cached the data, and they are constantly swapping metadata and updating with each other, which is a very attractive method of getting us to use these applications.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EBS (Elastic Block S...
Ranking in Cloud Storage
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Panzura CloudFS
Ranking in Cloud Storage
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
File System Software (2nd), NAS (6th), Cloud Storage Gateways (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Cloud Storage category, the mindshare of Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) is 2.6%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Panzura CloudFS is 5.2%, down from 5.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Storage
 

Featured Reviews

MuhammadAzhar Khan - PeerSpot reviewer
Diverse features and affordability drive effective resource management
Amazon EBS offers diverse features. It can be used for multi-purpose storage, supporting single, multiple, or heavy loads. It has different types for various use cases, allowing me to choose based on my specific requirements. The primary advantage of Amazon EBS is affordability compared to other solutions like EFS or FSX. It acts as a hard drive for servers, making it essential for operation.
Roger Clark - PeerSpot reviewer
Handles file locks effectively enabling seamless remote collaboration in global teams
It has not reduced the data storage cost. We have been trying to come up with a plan internally to archive project data at a certain time frame. However, our data continues to grow, so at the point of 25 terabytes, we had to buy another 25 terabytes license to exceed that threshold. It would have been nice if they had offered them in increments, of 5, 10, 15, or 20 terabytes than having to get a whole chunk of 25 terabytes again for licensing purposes, which is a little costly. It would be nice if Panzura offered data in increments instead of 25 terabytes per license. They have done a pretty good job of development from the point of offering new products. Pricing seems to be high for certain things, such as the audit feature of Panzura Data Services. It would be nice to see who deleted that 100 gig of data out there. They should make the pricing plan more attractive for a company of our size. We have almost 700 employees over the southeast from Texas to Florida and up to Tennessee, so we are a pretty big region.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Legal Firm
7%
Construction Company
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is better - Amazon's S3 Glacier or EBS (Elastic Block Store)?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Amazon's S3 Glacier or Elastic Block Store data storage software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Amazon's S3 Glacier, whi...
What do you like most about Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store)?
The durability and snapshot capabilities are good.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store)?
The cost of Amazon EBS storage is high. I rate the price as eight out of ten. It is expensive to store a lot yet provides significant cost-efficiency as I pay only for the storage time required.
What are the products that Panzura provides?
Panzura offers four main products: CloudFS, data services, smart apps, and global services. They call this "all-in-one solution" and it's for end-to-end cloud data management. Why is it called that...
What kind of industries does Panzura serve?
Hello, I think businesses from all industries that have their data on a cloud can benefit from Panzura. Especially if you have offices in various locations or your employees are working from home a...
Why was Panzura acquired? Is the acquisition going to cause a change?
I think Panzura may change in a positive direction now that it's been bought by Profile Capital. That's a very big investment company for technology businesses and I think it's an opportunity for ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Panzura Freedom
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Bazaar Voice, Crowd Strike, Adobe, Gamevil, Hess, CopperEgg, TotalJobs Group, SuperCell, Dropcam, Unilever
Petrofac, Komatsu, HCA Healthcare, Vanguard, Disney, Pokemon, US Department of Justice, Gensler, Fluor, AFRY, Milwaukee Tool, Navy Federal Credit Union, TechTarget
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) vs. Panzura CloudFS and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,484 professionals have used our research since 2012.