Panzura CloudFS Reviews

Primarily, we are an AEC firm that utilizes Panzura CloudFS for our file structure for our AEC applications, such as AutoCAD, Bentley, Revit, and various applications that are very chatty in a normal environment. We take advantage of Panzura CloudFS's traveling file locks to create a global namespace for our entire company. We have about ten or eleven filers throughout our region that support the function of the traveling file locks and enable us to use chatty AEC applications.

We have an authoritative copy of all of our data in one bucket in AWS. Any updates that are done travel almost instantly around to our controllers with metadata accessing that. For everything written, the filer will go to the cloud and update the authoritative copy of anything in our 27 terabytes.

Its ability to provide granular snapshots has been very good. We have used them quite frequently through the previous version tab in Windows. The snapshots have a time setting where they can be available for 30 days, 90 days, 100 days, or 120 days a year. That is our call to make that adjustment. They assisted us early on in the deployment with the settings which has been very convenient because several times, users come to us saying that they trashed a file. We can go and drill down. It is very user-friendly.

Panzura Data Services is a product that we utilize, and it allows us to drill down and search throughout our entire data structure. It has been very handy for seeing files and being able to get the files, but we do not have the auto feature that goes with that. That was rather expensive. However, Panzura Data Services has been useful to us. It is like a search tool.

We could see its benefits immediately. We deployed a master filer or controller that was on-site, which is now in the Azure cloud. We put up one filer in Atlanta and immediately saw the speed at which the files could be opened in a remote scenario. It was as if you were sitting locally in your LAN. The file locks perform as they should, which is important because those file locks travel around between the filers. When a user goes to a file and opens it, it belongs to the user. All the time, everybody else knows that the file is open. It is like a local scenario in the global namespace.

It is our primary storage.

It is easy for our organization to manage data using Panzura.

We take snapshots of everything every hour. It does incremental backups. We have several different types of backups, so we never have a problem with restoring if anything ever happens.

Panzura Detect & Rescue does a good job of detecting threats in real-time.

Panzura Edge helps give people access to the Panzura system on iPads or nontraditional devices, and it works great for that. It is very important for us to have secure data access for mobile devices.

Panzura has not helped to reduce data storage costs. We have all of our storage on Azure, but one thing they allowed us to do was to have a good way of archiving data. We do not have everything in hot storage anymore. We have some in cold storage. They had a way for us to move our data to a lower-cost tier.

We were able to realize its benefits pretty much immediately. We bought it originally for four offices and did a proof of concept for the first month. Within two weeks, we bought 23 additional units to put in all our offices.

My organization's storage for our production staff is on-site, and we are spread across 30 offices. This setup makes it much easier for us to workshare between staff and disparate geographic locations.

It took some time to see benefits while we moved all of our data into CloudFS, however, as soon as we had all of our data within the CloudFS container, we start immediately seeing the benefits. 

My use case for the Panzura CloudFS solution is especially for cloud storage.

We can add S3 storage as well as any cloud storage without any limitation. We get file collaboration since we have different locations with people in the same team who need to upload their logs or program files into a single shared folder. This is a very good product. The file locking mechanism and collaboration features are so good. Especially for snapshots and backups, they do not consume a lot of memory, and with this file collaboration, we can access any location in any folder using different filer names or access points. For example, I have devices in India, APAC, Australia, Russia, and the USA. When I move to Russia, I can change access from India to the Russian access point. If I go to the EMEA location, I can change it. If I'm going to Spain, I can change to the Spain access point while still accessing my shared folder sitting in India. They also avoid network hops. For instance, if I'm in India but need to access data in China or Spain, it simplifies the process and enhances collaboration.

It provides a single storage solution. It is easy to manage storage. We can connect to a Panzura filer in a collaborative way using the ring method. The consolidation capabilities are excellent, especially in terms of connectivity topology.

For collaboration, Panzura CloudFS is the best, though it is a little costly. If you prefer lower prices, there are alternatives such as NetApp or EMC, but for collaboration, Panzura CloudFS excels. Furthermore, the quick restore feature is also commendable in case files are corrupted or deleted. Vendor support can assist in restoring files efficiently even when large amounts of data, such as 100 GB, are involved.

The impact of Panzura CloudFS on our security posture is good. The vulnerability and security teams prepare reports, and we collaborate on fixes for reported vulnerabilities, with Panzura providing patch releases. 

My use cases for Panzura CloudFS include syncing it as file storage for primarily lab data. We are a biotech life science company, and we are using it as a target to write data that comes off lab machines, accessible from user workstations if needed, and syncing it to the cloud due to our sizable cloud presence.

I appreciate that Panzura CloudFS provides granular snapshots. We are using versioning and snapshotting. There have been times when somebody deleted something and we had to go back and grab it. It has worked well.

Panzura CloudFS has helped increase my organization's network resilience because we have copies of data cached locally and everything in an object store in Azure, which we've replicated to a DR cloud site that we test every year. It has been performing as needed during our failover testing.

We realized the benefits of Panzura CloudFS after a couple of months. It was really helpful because of the ease. Once we got everything set up and all our data migrated over, it was pretty seamless without any outages for the whole two years.

It has been easy to manage after everything was set up; it just goes, and with the auditing plug-in, we've had to pull some auditing reports, but that's been pretty easy as well. Managing my data using Panzura CloudFS is easy.

We got the Detect and Rescue feature on our last renewal, and while we've gotten some alerts, we haven't delved into a lot of the functionality yet.

My use case for Panzura CloudFS involves having multiple offices in the United States, and we use it to share all our file structure between the offices.

Panzura CloudFS has helped to increase the network resilience by 100%. It helped us with our growth, and we have had double-digit growth for years now, and they were able to help us achieve that.

It's a service product. Whenever you write data and want to save it to the cloud, the Panzura mediator acts as the go-between.

It's a good product, and I learned a lot when I was at Panzura. It's a file-based product.

There's one feature in Panzura called 'Master Snapshot'. It's very useful for recovering files because you don't need to go back to old backups. You can just restore from the master snapshots.

We use the solution for our employees to collaborate on files. We have employees in multiple offices, and the solution allows us to store their files on the server. That way, they can access those files in real time, regardless of their office.

Its most valuable features are the collaboration, the file snapshots, and the data protection the solution provides.