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Panzura CloudFS 8.4, the latest version of the Panzura hybrid cloud file platform, is now available. The release streamlines and accelerates cloud adoption while significantly reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) for both cloud and on-premises storage investments. It represents a major milestone in file data management for Panzura customers.

Panzura CloudFS 8.4 offers a suite of features designed to simplify and cost-optimize cloud adoption. It addresses critical data management challenges faced by modern businesses, particularly those dealing with the ever-increasing volume of unstructured data stored on NAS systems.

Built upon the world's fastest global file system, Panzura CloudFS 8.4 transforms complex, multi-component, multi-vendor environments into a unified, simplified data management solution. This approach reduces costs, mitigates risks, and simplifies operations.

Key features of this latest release include granular Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) within the CloudFS WebUI, integrated with Active Directory (AD), for more precise user permissions and improved compliance with internal and external controls. Tailored roles and permissions ensure only authorized individuals can access specific data. This fine-grained control helps IT teams meet increasingly rigorous data compliance standards.

The platform seamlessly integrates with AWS Glacier Instant Retrieval, significantly reducing storage costs without sacrificing performance. By intelligently tiering infrequently accessed data to the Glacier Instant Retrieval tier, organizations can optimize their cloud storage expenditure. This cost-saving measure allows businesses to allocate resources more efficiently, freeing up budget for other critical initiatives.

Panzura CloudFS 8.4 ensures a smooth transition to the cloud by seamlessly integrating with existing file workloads. Whether traditional file servers or virtualized environments, the platform simplifies the migration process, minimizing disruption to business operations. This streamlined approach delivers the benefits of the cloud without the complexity of traditional data migration methods.

Granular RBAC for CloudFS System Management 

Panzura CloudFS 8.4 introduces a more granular and customizable Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) system, addressing the evolving needs of organizations for detailed control over user actions and permissions within the CloudFS WebUI. This framework ensures that access to administrative functionalities is precisely controlled, guaranteeing that only authorized personnel can access, manage, and configure aspects of CloudFS, based on predefined user roles. 

RBAC in CloudFS 8.4 includes several key features designed to streamline management processes while maintaining tight security. Users must be authenticated before accessing the CloudFS administration via the WebUI, ensuring that only verified individuals can gain access. By integrating with a customer's Active Directory deployment for Single Sign-On (SSO), access to the Cloud WebUI is both simplified and secure. 

Access permissions are managed based on assigned roles, aligning user capabilities with their designated responsibilities. Customizable roles, such as administrators, file system or protocol administrators, operators, and viewers, clearly define the level of access and operational capabilities assigned to each user. This granular control over user permissions allows organizations to limit access to only what is necessary. 

The benefits of implementing RBAC in CloudFS 8.4 are manifold. By restricting administrative access at a granular level, RBAC fortifies the overall security of CloudFS deployments, minimizing the potential for unauthorized actions. This also helps ensure compliance with security and privacy regulations by enforcing strict access controls. 

Additionally, role-based assignments streamline the management of user access and permissions, making it easier for administrators to maintain secure environments. Overall, RBAC enhances the security, compliance, and manageability of CloudFS, making it a crucial feature for organizations looking to adopt and manage their cloud infrastructure efficiently. 

AWS S3 Storage Class Configuration 

IT budgets are under constant pressure, and optimizing storage spend is a top priority. Traditionally, all objects uploaded to an AWS S3 bucket are automatically assigned to the S3-Standard storage class. To utilize a different storage class, users are required to manually configure a bucket lifecycle policy, which is complex and has overhead costs. Moreover, if a lifecycle policy isn’t established, users might miss out on cost-saving features such as AWS S3 Intelligent-Tiering, leading to higher storage expenses. 

CloudFS 8.4 addresses this challenge by facilitating access to less expensive AWS storage tiers. Administrators can now streamline storage management by directly assigning objects to their desired storage class upon upload, eliminating the need for separate lifecycle policies and reducing application programming interface (API) calls. This simplifies the process, enhances cost efficiency, and ensures that storage management aligns more closely with best practices and budgetary considerations. 

Understanding the different storage classes is crucial for optimizing costs. The S3 Standard storage class is automatically assigned when an object is uploaded. However, the S3 Intelligent Tiering storage class optimizes costs by moving data to the most cost-effective access tier without performance loss or manual effort. It adjusts storage on a granular object level as access patterns change and has no retrieval fees. 

For a small monthly fee, it monitors access patterns and moves unused data to lower-cost tiers, offering cost savings across three low-latency tiers. This includes Frequent Access for newly uploaded or transitioned objects, Infrequent Access for data not accessed for 30 days, and Archive Instant Access for data not accessed for 90 days. 

The S3 Standard-IA storage class is designed for long-lived, infrequently accessed data, offering millisecond access like S3 Standard but with retrieval fees, making it best suited for data that’s rarely accessed. The S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class is ideal for archiving data that’s rarely accessed but requires millisecond retrieval. It offers cost savings over S3 Standard-IA with similar latency and performance, though with higher access costs. 

CloudFS caches frequently used data at the edge, enabling local-feeling performance and virtually eliminating the need to egress data from the cloud to support active file operations. As such, Glacier Instant Retrieval may be used with CloudFS to offer performant retrieval on the occasions it is required, while offering substantial overall storage savings. 

VM Support for Linux KVM (RHEL 9.4+) 

As the virtualization market continues to evolve, Panzura recognizes the need to offer expanded options for customers deploying CloudFS nodes at the edge. Previously, virtualization options included VMWare and Hyper-V. The addition of support for the Linux KVM virtualization platform in CloudFS 8.4 provides another option for reducing IT spending and optimizing storage infrastructure costs. 

CloudFS has been tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) release 9.4, one of the most popular and well-supported Linux distributions. This enables deployment of CloudFS in KVM on RHEL 9.4 and later, or on other compatible Linux distributions. 

By offering this expanded virtualization support, Panzura CloudFS 8.4 ensures that customers have the flexibility to choose the best deployment options for their specific needs, further reducing cloud infrastructure costs and enhancing the overall value of cloud deployments. 

In addition to these key enhancements, CloudFS 8.4 cloud mirroring, which maintains identical copies of data in two separate object stores to boost data availability, now accelerates synchronization of data changes made any time the primary object store was unavailable. This capability is now ten times faster than in the past and the synchronization itself serves to dramatically reduce egress charges.

Moreover, file operations for extremely large files and folders are also faster with this release, which improves file and folder renaming as well as changes to file and folder permissions, and some file write operations.