Peer Software announced PeerGFS 5.0, an enterprise-class software solution that helps customers solve data management challenges with file and object storage in multi-site, multi-vendor, and multi-cloud environments. Enhancing the solution through a new Dynamic Storage Utilization (DSU) capability, customers can now leverage the benefits of a distributed file system while controlling storage growth and costs at remote branch office (ROBO) sites.

PeerGFS enables enterprises to create a modern distributed file system that seamlessly integrates existing storage platforms across multi-site, on-premises and cloud storage. Using an Active-Active data services fabric, PeerGFS facilitates faster file access performance with local access to data, high availability and redundancy of data across synchronized storage systems, and continuous data protection (CDP).

"With the exponential growth of unstructured data, cost concerns of unfettered storage growth have dramatically risen," said Jimmy Tam, CEO, Peer Software. "While IT administrators want to reap the benefits of a distributed file system, the additional storage cost burden of fully replicated data copies at each site can strain budgets. With DSU, they are now able to set policies of what data and how much gets cached at each remote branch office site. The ability of PeerGFS to quickly install and transparently integrate on top of existing investments of on-premises and cloud-based storage also means that customers don't need to buy additional special purpose proprietary storage appliances just to implement a distributed or global file system."

In addition to the ability to replicate, synchronize, migrate, distribute, share and collaborate on files across their global environment, Peer also provides rich, deep analysis of file system characteristics and activity loads to more intelligently manage the explosive growth of unstructured data and plan for the future.

PeerGFS solves many data storage challenges including:

• Productivity - Synchronized data sets across distributed environments give end-users at each location fast local access to data (vs accessing data remotely across the WAN).

• High Availability - Continuous availability of data is ensured through the distributed file system through data redundancy (mirrored data) across sites and incorporation of a global namespace for failover/failback across sites.

• Data Agility - PeerGFS breaks down data silos and enables a distributed file system to be created across mixed storage systems (Microsoft Windows, NetApp Data ONTAP, DellEMC Isilon/VNX/Unity, Nutanix Files, S3, and Azure Blob) through asynchronous near real-time replication/synchronization across the systems.