What do you like best about the product?

Panzura let's you choose the backend cloud storage providers you want to keep the data in. Any S3 compatible provider works. Immutable snapshots, unlimited snapshots, all good stuff. Search all your file shares from one pane of glass. Global file locking.

What do you dislike about the product?

We are about 6 months into using Panzura in 31 sites with 75TB stored in the solution.

-High system requirements for the on-premise filers caused us to have to do a lot of hypervisor system upgrades.
-Price is pretty high to license the storage and sites. particularly when you consider we pay for our S3 storage separately.
-No solution for remote mobile workers to cache files locally.
-When adding site licenses, they insist on charging a "$700 install fee" to install additional filers in new sites which only takes 30 minutes and our team has already done many of the installations without them and is fully capable of doing the installs.
-HA works but is kind of rough, you have to rebuild the edge filer after an HA event (no failback), and that process takes a long time to make sure files are consistent. Makes you think hard before triggering HA. Two different types of HA, different rules for each. Not straighforward. Even testing HA is a big deal.
-Some file types/applications don't work well with the solution (like GIS data or any really chatty files). To be fair, this is a problem with many solutions.
-We have experienced bugs in two of their General Release OS updates that broke functionality. It seems to be a roll of the dice when doing an upgrade.
-Solution is very latency sensitive, make sure your latency is below 30ms.
-They have at least two dashboards you can use to view metadata storage, they both report different capacities, one shows 75TB, the other shows 100TB.
-New filers can take a long time to build thier metadata cache, we are seeing 2 days on a 1 gb fiber internet connection, as your data grows, this only increases.
-locating where files are locked is difficult in large multi-site environments, we are developing an application internally to deal with this.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Sharing engineering design files across teams located in 31 different offices.
We feel the data is better protected from ransomeware and we are able to keep many more snapshots at more frequent time intervals. Restores are less complicated from any site. The ability to search across all files. Data on who is accessing which files.

What do you like best about the product?

The software helps in deep data searching, protecting the data against any ransomware attacks, and a lot of beneficial useful insights and analytics for business growth.

What do you dislike about the product?

There's nothing to dislike about this product.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Deep data analytics & insights, and the protection against potential ransomware.