Panzura CloudFS & Symphony

Panzura CloudFS  is our primary solution for file servers and resiliency for our file shares. We have been demoing Panzura's Symphony tool, which has demonstrated many capabilities for automating and moving data. Beyond Symphony, we consolidated every file share and NAS  in the organization over to Panzura CloudFS . It has done a great job with that.

The best feature for us is the high availability and the security peace of mind. That has been an excellent feature for us over the past few years and has really helped us out of several tight spots. 

They have just addressed one of the features we were hoping for, which is colder storage tiers. They have that availability now. The only other thing beyond that is that their first-level support hasn't always been perfect. Once we have gotten up to the expert tiers, it has been great. I would suggest more training for their first-level support.

We are coming up on just about three years of using this solution.

There is some maintenance required. Occasionally, we restart a filer if there are any issues, but it is fairly lightweight as far as maintenance goes.

The scalability is great, I would rate it nine out of ten.

We have had everything from old-school self-hosted SMB file shares to NetApp . We had another solution prior as well. We have had several different offerings for our file shares. None of them do quite what Panzura CloudFS does. There are extra features with Panzura CloudFS, and it has more power than any of those tools offer.

Though I didn't own the implementation, I was present at the time. The time to value was pretty quick. We made the cutover fast, and the value from there was immediate.

We implemented as a customer without external assistance.

We have seen a return on investment. We have moved from several more expensive storage mediums into Panzura CloudFS.

I manage the costs, and while we haven't had to reevaluate the pricing since our first contract isn't up, I believe they are in line with the market, especially for the quality of product you get with Panzura CloudFS.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate this solution a nine overall.

We needed redundancy, and we needed to be able to recover, so it was both file storage and business continuity reasons. 

Panzura CloudF has helped increase my network resilience. We've had regional power outages, and we have been able to continue working with files at other locations. There's been no interruption, no downtime for the other locations, so the business continuity side of it is stellar.

I would have a very high opinion of the solution's ability to provide granular snapshots. We do have situations where people accidentally delete or move files, and being able to roll those back quickly with just a right-click is a great time saver and an advantage.

The best features are the synchronization between locations, the speed at which it presents those files to the users, and phenomenal support.

My impressions of Panzura CloudFS 's ability to consolidate data are very high because they have been aggressively evolving the product, listening to their customers, and making those changes where possible. They have done an outstanding job of listening to customers and solving their problems as the product evolved.

In the five years that I've been using Panzura CloudFS , they have actually addressed issues with performance, stability, and recoverability. They are constantly evolving that product in a good way.

I don't have anything to complain about regarding Panzura CloudFS. They're developing an AI side that's supposed to be around by this fall. They're a step ahead of the game on that as well, and I really don't have any deficiencies I can point out. However, the pricing could be more competitive.

I have been using the solution for five years.

I'd have to give the stability a ten out of ten. We've had power outages and VMs crash, and we've had to rebuild those.

The scalability is definitely a ten out of ten.

A little over 400 employees work with Panzura CloudFS, and all of them interact with it at some point, those are nationwide, multiple locations.

I would rate the technical support a nine because nobody is perfect.

Positive

I don't have any firsthand experience with the other products or vendors on the market other than looking at them. I've talked to peer review folks and other engineering firms, and there were good and bad experiences with everything as you would expect, but Panzura CloudFS is the market leader in that space as far as the engineering firms are concerned for a good reason, and they do a great job.

We have Panzura CloudFS deployed at locations using VMware. We've deployed it as images locally, and we're switching to Hyper-V  because of that whole debacle with VMware's pricing.

Regarding the deployment of Panzura CloudFS, it was very simple. I've racked servers for decades now, and I've rolled stuff out and had to move data around for new equipment, and it was very easy to point it at our existing data and just pull it right in.

The deployment took approximately a week, and I made the whole switch over on a weekend. We had pre-copied the stuff off. I came in on a Saturday morning and left here at 2:00 in the afternoon. Everything was completely flipped over in 8 to 10 hours.

The solution requires maintenance from my end. Whenever they release a new version, I schedule it with them during off hours, and they go ahead and upgrade them, and I double-check everything, usually it's done in six or seven hours.

The solution was purchased through a partner purchase.

It's hard to calculate the return on investment regarding productivity, but after doing it the old-fashioned way with servers, we've seen at least an 80% return on that.

It is a little bit pricey. I would rate the cost of Panzura CloudFS an eight out of ten.

I would recommend this solution to other users simply because they have the ability to solve problems, and after you do it, you'll understand why.

I would rate Panzura CloudFS overall a nine out of ten. More competitive pricing would make the solution a ten out of ten.

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.

What I appreciate the most about Panzura CloudFS  is that it just works; it provides enterprise-level application across all our offices and simplifies administration. Since the product works so well, we don't have to have a lot of issues or downtime. It helps us to be more efficient and more productive. 

We've been able to increase network resilience. We've had double-digit growth for years now, and Panzura helped us achieve that.

In terms of improvements for Panzura CloudFS, I would like to see the Edge feature. I would love for that feature to be usable for our company and our employees.

I have been using Panzura CloudFS since 2016, so nine years.

The stability of Panzura CloudFS is good.

The scalability of Panzura CloudFS is very good.

I have contacted the support. The quality of support from Panzura CloudFS is good; the speed is good, and they have knowledgeable staff.

Positive

The initial deployment was long with the amount of data we have. It was not difficult, it was just lengthy due to the amount of data that had to be sent to the cloud. 

For the deployment of Panzura CloudFS, the number of people required really depends on the size of the company. We had two people working on our deployment.

Panzura CloudFS takes care of all the maintenance. We just schedule the outage with them.

We saw the benefits of Panzura CloudFS immediately. Our remote offices were able to share files immediately after the product went live.

The pricing of Panzura CloudFS is relevant, and their pricing is comparable to other competitors. What you get is fair pricing.

I have tested out alternatives to Panzura CloudFS in my career, however, Panzura CloudFS is the number one product we used.

I would say to a colleague who prefers using big-name software companies that Panzura CloudFS is a solid solution. It's a solution that works, it's priced appropriately, and their support is good. 

On a scale from one to ten, I rate Panzura CloudFS a ten.

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. 

The best features of the Panzura CloudFS  solution include collaboration, which is my top priority and top feature. No one else provides this as effectively. Even though NetApp  is a big player in file storage, they do not offer this level of collaboration. Additionally, you can change any access point. Everything is simplified, meaning any user with basic storage knowledge can work on Panzura CloudFS due to its user-friendly menu.

We have seen improvements such as data compression, which is really good. It effectively manages hot data. Files accessed frequently are stored and synchronized across different locations. For instance, if an application server is hosted in the USA, users in Canada can access files swiftly without latency because hot data is synchronized to their local systems.

It also offers good auditing capabilities. In case of file deletions or permission changes, they can monitor everything, such as who did what, from which IP address, which system they connected to, and at what time. They can grab all the data. 

It is a little costly. 

The NFS service needs development. While Windows and SMB are effective, the NFS service shows some lag, making it a pain point for our many clients who use Linux devices.

I have been using the Panzura CloudFS solution for the last five years, and I have been supporting it for the last three years; I am a manager of those products. Their service is so good. We have not had any bad experiences with them.

I would rate the stability of Panzura CloudFS an eight out of ten.

For scalability, I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

I cannot provide the exact number of users accessing the solution. However, I have noted that Panzura's metadata cache works efficiently from the backend EC server. Thus, unlimited users can access the system without issues. Even 1,000 users can connect simultaneously unless there is a problem with the internal network.

Their technical support is excellent.

Positive

The deployment of Panzura CloudFS is not complex. It uses an OVA file format, and although it requires careful configuration following vendor instructions, anyone with basic storage knowledge can manage administrative tasks easily after a few days of familiarization.

Implementation of Panzura CloudFS is quick; it sets up very easily and does not take long.

The implementation does not take more than half an hour with the setup of computer resources and installation of the OS; adding new devices to a ring does take more time, as metadata synchronization occurs based on the network speed.

Panzura CloudFS can be deployed in both cloud and on-premises environments without limitations. Two to three years ago, there was a discussion about compatibility with seven different S3  storage providers. I know AWS  and Google are compatible, though I'm unsure about how Azure  works.

It can be deployed hybrid, which I heard is possible, and we are certain that cloud deployment works fine; so far, we have not faced any latency issues, and on-premises deployment also operates smoothly.

Panzura CloudFS saves us a significant amount of time frequently. We utilize huge storage capacity here.

I cannot detail how much Panzura CloudFS has reduced our data storage costs since it varies per customer and environment. Overall, it is quite costly compared to NetApp and similar solutions.

I cannot compare Panzura CloudFS directly with other vendors accurately; while NetApp has more features for NFS service, especially in security, Panzura excels in collaboration and its cloud file service; however, its NFS service lags in various aspects, with room for improvement.

I would recommend Panzura CloudFS to other users for its collaboration features and access points, but I advise caution regarding NFS service issues that require improvement, especially for Unix-based critical applications. However, for teams using Windows machines, my experience has been greatly positive.

Overall, I would rate Panzura CloudFS an eight out of ten.

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.

What I appreciate most about Panzura CloudFS  is that it really solves the problem we had when we moved all our server workloads to Azure , reducing our on-prem data center footprint sizably. We don't have to maintain a huge on-prem storage array, which is nice. It just works, and we haven't had any issues this whole time. A couple of times, maybe random questions have popped up, but their support has been very good to work with. They engage quickly, so that has been good.

One area for improvement regarding Panzura CloudFS is moving away from on-prem or local Active Directory. We're exploring a transition to Azure AD  or Entra ID, aiming to keep the product functional without heavy reliance on the local Active Directory.

I have been using Panzura CloudFS for almost two years now.

In the two years we've had Panzura CloudFS, we haven't experienced any outages, showing that it's been stable.

I believe Panzura CloudFS is scalable; we have made a couple of changes to enhance scalability that have worked. We considered expanding to multiple filers in other buildings, and we found it easy to achieve scalability.

I would give the support for Panzura CloudFS a ten out of ten because they are responsive and helpful. We wish many other companies we deal with were as good.

Positive

I haven't used any alternatives to Panzura CloudFS. We looked at a few other products before our decision, but those were mostly demos and not used live in production.

The initial deployment of Panzura CloudFS was easy. We worked with professional services who helped map it out and deploy and configure a handful of our filers while a migration team handled moving all the data, making it a straightforward process.

The full deployment of Panzura CloudFS took about 3 to 4 weeks from when we started setting up the filers to when all the data was migrated over. Slow transfer speeds affected the migration time.

After the deployment, Panzura CloudFS does not require any extensive maintenance. We've done a couple of upgrades as routine maintenance and a little reconfiguration after about a year for better resiliency, which was more of a business need than a product change.

For the deployment of Panzura CloudFS, we needed two or three people on our end.

It's competitive. I don't know what competitors are charging, but they have been very transparent, which is nice, and we've negotiated to avoid percentage increases.

To a colleague who prefers big-name software companies, I would say that Panzura CloudFS just works. I feel there's only one name that jumps out in their space. Many people don't fully understand the space they operate in, so it would be beneficial to just take a look and give it a try.

My overall rating for Panzura CloudFS is a nine out of ten.