Panzura Freedom 8 Multi-Cloud File Services Platform Ramps up Collaboration Between Distributed AEC Teams

Patrick Harr, CEO at Panzura, spoke with AECCafe Voice about the launch of the new Panzura Freedom 8 multi-cloud file services platform, announced June 26th. According to company materials, Panzura Freedom 8 delivers key advancements in performance, scale, cloud data protection, central management, search, analytics and mobile access in one global cloud-native file system.

What is the primary advantage of Freedom 8 multi-cloud file services platform?

For AEC firms, Freedom 8’s global cloud filesystem enables distributed design and engineering teams across the globe to collaborate in real-time on projects and act as one team. This significantly improves team productivity by enabling previously unused design team capacity and talent in different parts of the world. As all team members access the same data and projects by leveraging our patented global file locking, teams can enjoy 24/7 collaborative global design and development. We ensure that if one team member is working on a subset of a file, another team member located across the world can work on another area of the project file and that user won’t collide or accidentally overwrite the main project file.

What this ultimately means is that projects are completed more efficiently, extra staffing costs aren’t incurred, team productivity rises dramatically and profitability accelerates. We have hundreds of AEC firms including AF, a multi-billion dollar design and engineering firm in Sweden, that are using the Freedom global file system for real-time cross site collaboration with Revit and CAD design tools.

Finally, because Freedom 8 is a cloud native filesystem, customers gain the benefit of being “in the cloud” with immediate access to files for great user experience, automated cloud backup and data protection for their important IP, protection from ransomware and unlimited file storage capacity at a significantly reduced cost vs traditional storage platforms.

What were customers using before this platform?

Traditional storage platforms were used in concert with CAD applications. But because these platforms are locally deployed on premise they do not provide benefit to distributed design teams, require additional products like backup software and WAN optimization and are costly to keep up with the growing file data explosion. In addition, some customers have turned to VDI but this also doesn’t solve the problem of bringing the data to designer and instead still requires an expensive, non-global approach to project design.

Can you explain what Cloud Mirroring really means and why it’s an important capability?

Building on our history of providing integrated cloud data protection and high availability for mission critical projects and important IP, we have introduced in Freedom 8 an industry first feature that enables customers to have the highest data protection and business continuity with multi-cloud mirroring. Cloud mirroring acts simply by “mirroring” or writing the data simultaneously to two or more clouds e.g. AWS and Azure. This ensures that a firm has two primary copies of the same active data l.

Key benefits of cloud mirroring:

– customers are not susceptible to full or regional public cloud outages as cloud mirroring provides immediate business continuity by automatically failing over to the second cloud if a failure occurs. This means no downtime for the business.

– protection from human error accidentally deleting a primary storage bucket in a cloud provider

– faster response time vs replication services offered in public clouds

How does Cloud Mirroring lower costs?

Cloud mirroring significantly improves business continuity in case of sudden downtime and provides a fail-safe backup copy of data in case of human error on deletion. This in turns saves customers significant dollars in terms of business disruption. Again imagine if the AWS East region goes down. Prior to cloud mirroring, customers would experience significant downtime and significant loss of billable hours and productivity until that region came back up. Now with cloud mirroring AEC firms won’t business downtime if this cloud failure occurs as we simply autofailover to the other cloud keeping the business up and running as if the downtime even never occurred.

Does incoming data have to be delivered in a particular format or does the Panzura platform rewrite it?

Standard data migration tools like robocooy that support standard SMB and NFS protocols can be used to move the data into our Freedom 8 filers. We take care of the rest in terms of converting the data into native cloud object storage format (S3), deduplicating, compressing and encrypting data in the cloud.

Can you explain the scale and what you mean by global sites in one global file system?

Scale for Freedom 8 that we support is in two dimensions – scale in terms of number of users/designers in a local site or office; and scale in terms of total number of sites or offices that can be supported in the global file system deployed across the world. We support hundreds of thousands in a single site in a cluster and unlimited number of sites or offices distributed around the world.

The scale we support is unlike any other in the industry due to our patented Smartsynch technology that replaces traditional slower Rsynch for data replication. With Smartsynch we have real-time replication of data and insure consistency of files with global file locking. In short with Smartsynch and our 8th gen cloud native global filesystem, we can interconnect users, applications and data in a single (not multiple disconnected volumes like others) global filesystem with great user experience and the ability to collaborate globally on projects.

Is the Search and Analyze capability faster than it was?

Search and analytics capabilities have expanded to include not only powerful meta data and deep content search for files by users (enables quick find of a file or recovery of a file) but also auditing of files in terms of who has accessed what, where, when and how. This is critical for IP protection and data governance. In addition, we provide cost analytics and Finally we have introduced new analytics capabilities to monitor and alert on application and user performance such as Revit.

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Additional facts from company materials:

Unlike other global cloud file systems that force customers to split file data into multiple disconnected volumes due to scale, performance and file locking limitations, Panzura Freedom 8 is the only solution that provides the Power of ONE without limits:

• One Global Cloud File System: Provides globally connected data fabric for applications, machines and people and eliminates copy data sprawl and data islands by consolidating file data into a single source of truth.
• One Global Experience: Ensures consistent, fast access to data from anywhere in the world.
• One Collaborative Team: Delivers faster team performance and significant productivity gains accelerating time to market for projects of all sizes.
• One Vision of Data: Enables the ability to search, analyze and control data to drive intelligent business decisions and improve data security and compliance.
• One Bottom Line Result: Increases productivity of teams while reducing file storage cost by up to 70 percent, yielding higher profitability.

Tags: AEC, architects, architecture, Cloud, collaboration, design, engineers, infrastructure, iPad, Panzura

Categories: AEC, AECCafe, architecture, IoT, project management, rendering, sustainable design

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