

Panzura CloudFS and NetApp FAS Series compete in the storage solutions category. Panzura CloudFS has the advantage in collaboration due to its strong features, while NetApp FAS Series excels in file and block storage, offering high availability and scalability.
Features: Panzura CloudFS offers a unified namespace supporting compression, deduplication, snapshots, and efficient file synchronization. Its collaboration capabilities and strong disaster recovery are key strengths. NetApp FAS Series provides robust file and block storage, effective data management through ONTAP OS, and integration with virtual environments.
Room for Improvement: Panzura CloudFS faces challenges with cost, performance over long distances, and integration with Azure AD. There are licensing cost concerns and a need for enhanced remote access. NetApp FAS Series could reduce costs, improve centralized management and integration, and enhance performance monitoring and replication.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Panzura CloudFS is recognized for its ease of cloud deployment and strong technical support, with flexible deployments across public and hybrid cloud environments. NetApp FAS Series is mainly deployed on-premises, praised for stability but needing better support and integrated management tools.
Pricing and ROI: Panzura CloudFS is considered costly yet it provides significant ROI through productivity and network resilience. Users value its file-sharing capabilities. NetApp FAS Series, while competitively priced, faces high cost considerations, with comprehensive features that can justify these costs but may challenge price-sensitive customers.
If you have the configuration well maintained and configured, you should have good efficiency and compression for the clients and for yourself.
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.
Sometimes, the support was inadequate because the initial architecture was poorly defined.
We are also using it ourselves for the SAN and CIFS protocol.
They often provide basic solutions, such as suggesting a failover or a power cycle, which are not the sophisticated solutions we expect from a vendor.
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.
We normally avoid current versions and use versions that have been running for at least two months in client usage before updating drivers.
NetApp FAS Series is scalable, and it is possible, but you need to pay.
The NetApp FAS Series is scalable and offers numerous solutions, but only if customers are willing to invest in the shelves.
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.
When panic occurs on the node, it reboots itself, and we have experienced numerous hardware-related issues.
Most things are tailor-made, and we avoid downtimes even with primitive CLI commands.
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.
Storage companies should create encrypted storage solutions between the OS and storage to protect against ransomware attacks.
Nutanix leads the business in this approach, and I feel that NetApp is missing some aspects, such as CPU, GPU, and RAM, in its AI portfolio.
There is an opportunity there for NetApp with Cloud Volumes ONTAP.
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.
The pricing of NetApp FAS Series is not cheap, but in comparison to other vendors, NetApp FAS Series is affordable.
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.
While NVMe disks are expensive and require three disks for parity calculations, hard drives in NetApp FAS Series are inexpensive, making it more cost-efficient per GB, even with RAID tech implementation.
Our IOPS are very high, reaching somewhere about 50k to 150k or 1.150k.
One important feature for customers is its ease of use and continuity, enabling seamless usage across on-premise and cloud environments.
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.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| NetApp FAS Series | 10.8% |
| Panzura CloudFS | 2.9% |
| Other | 86.3% |


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 31 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 38 |
| Large Enterprise | 58 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 2 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 7 |
| Large Enterprise | 3 |
NetApp FAS series is an enterprise-level storage system that provides a wide variety of data management services, including data protection, block and file storage, and data management.
NetApp FAS is designed to be highly scalable, allowing your organization to grow storage capacity on demand. NetApp FAS also supports multiple protocols, including NFS, SMB, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel, as well as various storage architectures, including SAN (Storage Area Network) and NAS (Network-Attached Storage).
The FAS series has multiple data protection and data management features, including snapshots, cloning, replication, and deduplication, to help secure your data and manage it more efficiently. The system integrates with other NetApp products and solutions, to create a unified data management platform. The system can be deployed on-premise, on multi-cloud environments, or hybrid.
NetApp FAS Series Benefits and Features
NetApp FAS series provides its users with several key benefits and features, including:
Reviews from Real Users
NetApp FAS Series stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its speed, reliability, and a wide variety of features.
Adriano S., IT project and infrastructure service manager, writes, “The replication feature is noteworthy because it's faster than most and it uses little bandwidth. Then there's the friendly interface that the equipment offers. With this interface, it is very easy to manage.”
Temitope O., a NetApp product manager at Hiperdist Ltd, says, “I like the unified management feature because sometimes you end up running a single protocol on the entire system. You rather have a system for a particular protocol and another system for other protocols, especially in a big environment like mine.”
Panzura CloudFS is a cloud file system that enables efficient collaboration and data synchronization across multiple offices with features like file snapshots, data protection, and network resilience.
With Panzura CloudFS, organizations achieve seamless file synchronization and management across distributed networks. Offering a single namespace and capabilities like compression, deduplication, and metadata management, it simplifies administration and supports enterprise-level applications. Despite its strengths in speed, security, and customer support, there are areas for improvement such as performance for international access, alert systems, and pricing.
What are the key features of Panzura CloudFS?Industries such as architecture and biotech leverage Panzura CloudFS to manage complex file needs efficiently. It supports applications like AutoCAD and lab data management, offering real-time access and synchronization, important for businesses with distributed teams needing high resiliency and redundancy.
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