DEVOPSdigest

Panzura announced that within the past 60 days, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has awarded the company eight new patents.

These patents cover key enabling technology for the Panzura distributed cloud file system, which provides true storage consolidation in the cloud without sacrificing performance at the edge. As a result, customers can move to hybrid cloud storage rapidly to manage exponential unstructured data growth and reduce total storage costs by up to 70 percent. Panzura has won 26 patents to date, with 19 more pending.

Specifically, the new patents cover:

- Data locality policies and caching: With Panzura, customers can control what data is cached and where to maximize performance by helping to eliminate the need to download data from the cloud. Competitors cannot deliver this granular level of control, which limits the level of performance their customers can enjoy.

- Global deduplication: Panzura’s ability to conduct global deduplication minimizes the data that is uploaded to the cloud. More specifically, data ingested at multiple locations will only appear once in the cloud. Additionally, Panzura enables every location to immediately read data, even after deduping for improved backup.

- Recovering a VM from the cloud: Customers can recover virtual machines (VMs) quickly, enabling them to get back up and running faster after disaster strikes. Competitors cannot recover a VM from the cloud, so recovery times are slower.

- Deleting a file from a distributed file system: Other vendors experience a time delay in file deletion, which can lead to data corruption. With Panzura, deletion is instantly communicated across filers, which eliminates the potential for data corruption at the time of deletion.

- Performing antivirus in a distributed file system: Unlike competing systems, Panzura can use a virtual machine (VM) in the cloud to perform antivirus (A/V) scans, which eliminates any performance degradation for end-users, prevents cache pollution on local Panzura filers, and eliminates the need to manage hardware for the scans.

- Distributed change notification: This patent covers a core technology that underpins the Panzura distributed file locking capability. Specifically, this technology protects and communicates file and folder changes between controllers while clients work on the same projects or files. A change notification is sent to the client if any other client or any other controller makes a change to the folder or files within the folder. As a result, end-users collaborating on a file from different locations experience interacting with files as if they were all working off the same physical device, because file updates and new files are instantly seen by everyone.

- Synchronizing file updates between two cloud controllers of a distributed file system: When data is needed by a user at another site, Panzura sends only the metadata. The receiving site then downloads the necessary data from the cloud. This is a thousand times faster than the way competitors accomplish this same feat using rsync. This patent is part of the Panzura SmartSync™ capability that helps make collaboration real time and protects customers from ransomware attacks by quickly restoring from snapshots.

- Distributed interim notifications: This technology ensures 100 percent data consistency in local caches, speeding up performance for the end user, even when files are accessed from multiple locations.

“Since the beginning, Panzura has consistently led innovation in hybrid cloud storage, and this grant of eight patents is yet another demonstration of our leadership,” said John Taylor, co-founder and CTO at Panzura. “Our distributed cloud file system for object storage provides customers the opportunity to start reaping the benefits of hybrid cloud storage almost immediately: more effective management of their valuable and ever-growing unstructured data while simultaneously enjoying a cost reduction of up to 70 percent.”