During the recent 60th Edition of the IT Press Tour in San Jose, VMblog had the chance to meet with the Panzura team, including CTO Sundar Kanthadai, Global Head of Marketing Petra Davidson, and VP of Product Marketing Glen Shok. The briefing offered an interesting look at how far this company has come since its founding in 2008, and more importantly, where they're heading next.

The Panzura Story: From Storage Pioneer to Data Management Leader

Let's start with some context. Panzura was created with a clear mission - helping enterprises use cloud object storage as a high-performance, local-feeling data center for global data and workforces. As Davidson explained during our briefing, their founders looked at the fact that compute was being extracted from storage, and they realized companies, along with their data, were moving to the cloud... and that was going to create more problems for companies as things became more distributed.

Fast forward to 2025, and Panzura has grown into a ~200-person company with a remote-first approach that lets them recruit talent globally. They've made the Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Companies list in both 2022 and 2023, showing strong momentum in the market.

Understanding Panzura's Core Technology

At the heart of Panzura's offering is their CloudFS platform, which takes a unique approach to managing unstructured data. During our briefing, Kanthadai explained that CloudFS was built around solving a fundamental problem - how to let distributed teams work with shared data while maintaining security and performance.

The platform's architecture differs from traditional approaches. Instead of the typical hub-and-spoke model used by competitors like AWS FSx, Azure Files, and Nasuni, Panzura employs a hub-and-spoke design with an additional mesh network between nodes. This allows for what Davidson described as "global file consistency" - ensuring files are up to date for everyone, everywhere, as soon as they open them.

What sets Panzura apart in the market? A few key things:

• Real-time deduplication at a global scale
• Immutable snapshots that can't be encrypted by ransomware
• Global file locking that prevents conflicts during collaboration
• Sub-60 second global RPO (Recovery Point Objective)

The Three Pillars

The Panzura team also emphasized their "Enterprise Data Success Framework" built on three core pillars:

1. Command & Control: Providing complete visibility into data across the organization, helping teams understand what they have and who's using it.
2. Resilience: Protecting against both internal and external threats through immutable data and snapshots. Or as they described it, "Pristine data is always just a moment away."
3. Immediacy: Ensuring users can access and collaborate on files instantly, regardless of location. This is achieved through their unique mesh architecture that synchronizes changes every 60 seconds or sooner.

"Having all three pillars working together is essential," Davidson explained. "You can't just focus on security without considering usability, or speed without ensuring data integrity."

CloudFS 8.5 Adapt Arrives

The biggest news from our briefing was the release of CloudFS 8.5 Adapt. This major platform update includes several features that caught my attention:

Regional Store: Bringing Data Closer to Users

One of the most interesting additions is Regional Store, which lets organizations create multiple object stores for localized access. As Kanthadai explained, "What would happen is, let's say this is U.S. east, in the UK and Asia, the admin to the cloud FS environment would do what's called pre-warming the cache for the people coming in... Now with Regional Store, everything is local."

This feature supports up to four object storage buckets across cloud regions, helping solve latency issues for distributed teams - a common pain point for global organizations.

Instant Node: Rethinking Business Continuity

One of the most compelling features unveiled during our briefing was Instant Node - and it's worth explaining why this matters. Think about traditional high availability (HA) setups: companies typically buy duplicate hardware that sits idle, waiting for something to go wrong. It's like having a spare car in your garage that you're paying for but rarely use. Not exactly cost-effective, right?

Panzura's Instant Node flips this model on its head. Instead of requiring dedicated backup hardware, it cleverly uses available resources in your existing environment. As Shok explained during our session, "If you're in a virtualized environment, you already have some overage, right? You have extra CPU space, you have extra disk, you have extra memory or like v-motion failover ability. We know you have extra space."

Here's where it gets interesting: When something goes wrong - whether it's a hardware failure, natural disaster, or planned migration - Instant Node can spin up a replacement in under five minutes.

The practical applications are numerous:

• Quick recovery from hardware failures
• Seamless migration away from VMware environments
• Regional disaster avoidance (think hurricanes approaching your data center)
• Cost-effective business continuity without dedicated hardware

What's particularly clever about this approach is its flexibility. Whether you're dealing with an unexpected outage or planning a strategic migration, Instant Node can handle both scenarios without the traditional overhead of dedicated HA infrastructure. For IT teams trying to balance budget constraints with business continuity requirements, this represents a practical middle ground between expensive redundancy and basic backup solutions.

Symphony: The Data Services Evolution

Beyond CloudFS, Panzura shared details about their Symphony platform, which came from their moonwalk acquisition. This platform handles three key areas:

• Data discovery and assessment
• Risk and compliance
• Dynamic data movement orchestration

What's particularly interesting is Symphony's role as what Shok calls a "Zero Trust Data Broker" for AI initiatives. "Think about Symphony as a zero trust data broker... You need something in between the requester and the houser of your data," he explained during our session.

AI Ready Infrastructure

The team emphasized how Symphony helps organizations prepare for AI workloads while maintaining security and compliance. It can identify sensitive data like PII and PHI, ensuring AI systems only access appropriate information - a growing concern as more companies explore large language models.

Market Position and Strategy

Panzura takes an interesting approach to the market. While they maintain a minimum deployment size of 25TB, they work through various channels:

• Reseller partners (handling about 86% of deals)
• Managed services partners
• Cloud marketplaces (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Direct sales for organizations that prefer it

Their pricing model is refreshingly straightforward, based on capacity and including 24/7/365 support across all tiers.

Looking Ahead: Panzura's Vision for the Future

What really caught my attention during the IT Press Tour briefing was Panzura's clear-eyed vision of where enterprise data management is heading. The team isn't just thinking about incremental improvements - they're preparing for fundamental shifts in how organizations work with data.

AI/ML Readiness Takes Center Stage

The integration of AI and ML into enterprise operations isn't just a possibility - it's happening now. Panzura is positioning itself at the intersection of unstructured data management and AI workflows. As Glen Shok explained during our session, this is particularly relevant for enterprises building their own large language models: "If you have a NetApp that's been sitting on the floor for 10 years, people have like 15 directories deep with files containing a bunch of PII data. No human is going to find that file - you know who's going to find that file in 30 seconds? An AI."

This reality is driving Panzura's development of sophisticated data brokering capabilities. Their approach isn't just about storing data - it's about intelligently managing access and ensuring AI systems can safely work with enterprise data without exposing sensitive information. 

The Move Toward Autonomous Operations

Perhaps the most ambitious aspect of Panzura's roadmap is their push toward what they call "autonomic" infrastructure. As Petra Davidson outlined during our briefing, "We're aiming for a place where we're taking licensing but the capabilities that have to understand with them, all of them in order space, not just IT teams with the base line."

This autonomic vision includes systems that can:

• Self-heal when issues are detected
• Automatically optimize performance and resource usage
• Configure themselves based on usage patterns
• Proactively protect against threats

Creating a Seamless Data Environment

The team emphasized that future success isn't just about storing data - it's about making it flow seamlessly across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. They shared that they're working on ways to remove friction from data operations.

This vision extends to their Symphony platform, which they see as a key component in enabling what they call "vendor-neutral" data orchestration.

What This Means for Enterprises

For IT leaders planning their data strategy, Panzura's direction suggests several important considerations:

• Data management is evolving from a storage-centric model to an intelligence-centric one
• AI/ML readiness needs to be built into the foundation of data infrastructure
• Autonomous operations will become increasingly important for managing complex data environments
• Vendor neutrality and flexibility will be crucial for future-proofing investments

While these might seem like ambitious goals, Panzura's track record of innovation - from their early cloud file system patents to their current work with AI data brokering - suggests they have the technical chops to deliver on this vision.

As we wrapped up our briefing, it was clear that Panzura sees 2025 as a pivotal year for enterprise data management. With their FIPS 140-3 certification already achieved and new capabilities rolling out, they're positioning themselves to help enterprises navigate the increasingly complex intersection of data management, AI, and security. 

Final Thoughts

After spending time with the Panzura team, it's clear they're thinking beyond traditional storage and file systems. Their focus on data intelligence, automation, and AI readiness shows they understand where enterprise IT is heading.

The combination of CloudFS 8.5 Adapt's practical improvements and Symphony's strategic capabilities creates an interesting platform for organizations dealing with distributed teams, growing data volumes, and emerging AI initiatives. While Panzura might not be the most widely known name in enterprise storage, they're definitely worth watching as data management continues to evolve.

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