Panzura Sees Gains for its Global Cloud Storage Platform

Cloud storage solutions company Panzura announced a banner year for its Global Cloud Storage Platform, certification from Cisco for its UCS E Server, and a successful customer implementation.

Strong adoption in 2012

The global cloud storage solution from Panzura takes a unique approach to data management strategies that places NAS features into its cloud onramp appliances. In 2012 the company reported that revenue increased by nearly 500 percent over the previous year, customers grew by 700 percent, and customers surpassed multiple petabytes of storage using the Panzura Global Cloud Storage System.  With typical deal sizes in the multi-millions of dollars Panzura has customers from a variety of industries such as healthcare, media and entertainment, financial services, government and education.  DreamWorks Animation SKG uses Panzura to leverage follow-the-sun content production, and as a platform for archiving reusable content in a central repository.

“We are tremendously excited by the enthusiastic reception Panzura solutions have received in the market,” said Randy Chou, CEO of Panzura. “Customers continue to find new ways to leverage our core technology to meet a wide variety of storage needs in a broad array of use cases and industries. Panzura is expanding rapidly to meet growing demand as IT executives perceive Panzura as the only enterprise-class platform for leveraging cloud storage across all leading providers.”

Cisco UCS certification

Panzura announced that its Global Cloud Storage System has been certified by Cisco for its UCS E Server, providing Panzura's local NAS features plus integration with major cloud storage platforms. Available in both physical and virtual form factors the Panzura Quicksilver Cloud Storage Controller runs as an ESX virtual machine (VM) on Cisco’s UCS E Server.  The Cisco-certified Quicksilver VM can be used alone or in concert with physical or virtual Quicksilver controllers used throughout an enterprise’s infrastructure to enable seamless cloud storage, file sharing, data protection, and access to any data from anywhere anytime by any user, subject to permission policies.

“Adding Panzura to the Cisco Developer Network as a VM for the UCS E Server brings enterprise-class cloud-attached storage to Cisco users for the first time,” said Jim Thayer, vice president of channels and business development at Panzura. “No other cloud storage solution supplies Panzura’s scale, features, military-grade security, or performance to Cisco users.”

Panzura selected by Healthcare Realty

Panzura announced that Healthcare Realty, a leading real estate investment trust with more than 30 sites that integrates owning, managing and developing properties associated with the delivery of healthcare services, has selected Panzura’s  Global Cloud Storage System and an EMC Atmos private cloud to replace its global Citrix implementation for file distribution and sharing. Looking to improve the quality of file sharing within the company Healthcare Realty selected Panzura, in particular the global file locking capability that prevented file corruption from simultaneous writes. Users have responded by saying they see a “tremendous difference” in performance and access, characterizing the system responsiveness as “amazing.

“We really struggled with Citrix to provide our distributed users over more than 30 offices with rapid access to files we need to run our business,” said Robert Dillard, Associate Vice President of Technology Services at HR. “Panzura allows rapid, secure serving of files to any user regardless of location, seamlessly integrating with the cloud as a very low-cost flexible storage tier that can instantly scale to whatever capacity we need. Users love it.”