First Product From Panzura Enables Cloud Storage to be Faster Than Local Tier 1 Storage

SAN FRANCISCO, June 1 /PRNewswire/ -- New storage company, Panzura (www.panzura.com), opens its doors today and brings its first product to market by taking a new approach to traditional storage called Application Network Storage (ANS). By combining application logic with storage technology, Panzura is able to provide solutions that are faster and cheaper than the traditional approaches to tier 1 storage.

The first product to use the ANS architecture is the Panzura Application Cloud Controller (ACC) – an enterprise-grade scalable product that is ideal for both branch offices and headquarters. The ANS approach turns traditional network-centric storage on its head by focusing on the application and its data usage pattern. Some of the key features include: deep packet inspection and acceleration combined with cutting edge deduplication and encryption. For supported applications – Microsoft SharePoint®, CIFS and NFS – the Panzura ACC provides offline capabilities through its on-board SSD storage.

"ANS is the logical evolution from NAS and SAN storage," said Randy Chou, CEO and Co-Founder of Panzura. "We can ensure the right data is in the right place at the right time because we use automated application storage tiering (AAST). This gives us the best performance and superior features, such as offline access and global live deduplication, while decreasing the storage footprint and cost."

Enterprises have the choice of using Panzura's ACC either in the cloud or without a cloud presence to better utilize their existing storage arrays. Whether it's used for data replication, backup or primary storage, the Panzura ACC brings higher performance, reduction in storage footprint, cost savings, enhanced user experience, and an increase in security, via military grade encryption.

"Panzura's application-aware technology and strong background in networking give it a unique lens as they take a new approach to bringing cloud storage to enterprise data centers," said Terri McClure, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "Cloud storage holds tremendous promise for enterprises and Panzura's solution can help companies to get the performance and cost benefits of the public and private cloud while keeping the control and security of their data."

Given Panzura's strong position on securing enterprise data at its source, Iron Mountain was a natural cloud storage partner for backup and archiving services. Iron Mountain's focus on cloud security and reliability is a fitting complement to the security features offered by the ACC inside the enterprise itself.

"Iron Mountain's Archive Services Platform will provide Panzura's customers with an enterprise-class cloud storage solution," said Jaimin Patel, director of developer programs, Iron Mountain Digital. "By integrating Panzura's cutting-edge storage technology with Iron Mountain's unparalleled security and reliability, companies can now integrate secure cloud storage into their environments with the confidence that their data is protected by one of the leading information management brands in the industry."

A key building block of Panzura's solution relies on the ability to move and serve data across the world at very high speeds enabling a new user experience.

"Limelight Networks has been working with Panzura to provide customers with seamless integration between their application-centric storage products and our global content delivery service. Together, we have demonstrated very high sustained transfer speeds to several large global enterprise customers. We look forward to continuing to work with Panzura on extending its products to take full advantage of our global, intelligent delivery platform to enable their unique infrastructure-as-a-service positioning in the market," said Jason Thibeault, Senior Director, Technology Alliances, Limelight Networks, Inc.

The company is already working with large enterprise customers to solve their storage problems. A Fortune 50 energy company uses Panzura's ACC to upload petabytes of data into the cloud at close to 1 gigabyte per second for backup and DR purposes. Panzura's ACC is also currently being used at a large public technology company with offices in the US and the UK where users were experiencing wait times of up to 50 seconds for the SharePoint home page to load. Without changing anything in the infrastructure, the ACC improved the performance by 20 times.

Panzura's ACC currently supports Microsoft SharePoint, CIFS, and NFS, with more planned for the future. The product is available immediately for enterprises and resellers at www.panzura.com.

About Panzura

Panzura is a venture-backed storage company that was founded in July 2008.  Its mission is to enable cloud storage to be faster and more secure than tier 1 local storage. Focused on Fortune 1000 enterprises, Panzura takes an application rather than network-centric approach to storage and has developed the first Application Network Storage (ANS) appliance. The benefits are high performance for less, reduced storage costs, and data mobility regardless of whether or not an enterprise is using the cloud.

Panzura is founded by Randy Chou and John Taylor, veterans of the software industry who were part of the founding teams at both Aruba Networks and Alteon Websystems, both of which became multi-billion dollar public companies.

SOURCE Panzura