This month we turn to distributed (cloud) filesystems as we talk with Glen Shok (@gshok), VP of Alliances for Panzura. Panzura uses backend (cloud or onprem, S3 compatible) object store with a ring of software (VMs) or hardware (appliance) gateways that provides caching for local files as well as managing and maintaining metadata which creates a global NFS and SMB file system with near local access times.
Glen is an industry (without the grey beard) veteran with the knowledge to back that up. He’s been in the industry so long that we could probably have spent an hour just talking about where people are that we both know. Listen to the podcast to learn more
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The interesting part about Panzura is their gateway ring. It not only manages local file caching and metadata maintenance/access, but it provides an out-of-(data path)-band file (byte range) lock coordination service, cache coherency (via delta block changes) and other services. All the metadata (and data) is backed up on backend object storage, but it’s the direct access to the metadata and its out of band control path as well as its caching service that supplies the near local access times for data.
Panzura supports any public (AWS, Azure, GCP & IBM) cloud object storage for backend data storage as well as a few, on prem, solutions (I think Glen mentioned IBM COS & Cloudian and their website mentions Wasabi, Scality and NetApp StorageGrid). Glen said they are on each of the public cloud’s marketplaces and with virtual gateways, its very easy to spin up and try.
Their system provides global (local, at the gateway) dedupe to reduce backend storage footprint and (both out of band and from backend storage) delta block changes for local cache updates. So in the event that an old version of the file happens to be present in their local cache gateway, it only needs retrieve the changed data from the object storage backend (or another gateway). All this local caching, dedupe and changed block tracking, helps to reduce cloud egress charges.
Data written to backend storage is immutable and versioned. So customers can retrieve any version of any file that was ever destaged to their backend. Glen said they write huge objects, presumably to help reduce storage footprint, IO overhead and API calls.
Glen claimed what with 3-way replication within a cloud region and 1-way replication outside the cloud region, customers no longer have to backup data. I respectively disagreed. He believes over time, customers will come to realize their use of backups for restores, becomes so rare that they can reduce backup frequency, if not eliminate it altogether. Some follow on discussion ensued, but in the end we seemed to agree to disagree on this topic.
Panzura also supports cross cloud mirroring. So, one could have their data mirrored from one cloud to another. One of these clouds will be used as a primary and only in the event that a majority of the gateway rings agree that the primary is DOWN and the secondary is UP, will they all automatically cut over to using the secondary storage cloud. While failover is automated, fail back requires operator intervention.
Panzura is charged for on managed data capacity. But cloud or on prem object storage is in addition to this and is charged for separately by the object storage provider.
As far what size file systems they support, Glen mentioned that they are ZFS internally, so any size imaginable. But he did concede, that at some point, metadata management becomes a problem and that they often suggest splitting apart 20PB file systems into 2 10PB (gateway rings) file systems to deal with this issue.
As for other solutions offered by Panzura, they have a K8s container block storage for persistent volumes that scales in capacity/performance using K8s services/resources.
Glen Shok, VP Alliances, Panzura
Glen Shok has been in the data center and storage industry for over 20 years.
Starting his career at Cisco in the late 90s. Moving to a few startups which were acquired by Brocade and Oracle. Glen has held positions in sales, sales leadership, product management and marketing, and Office of the CTO at Zones, prior to coming to Panzura.
He can’t decide what he likes to do, but at Panzura, he’s the VP of Strategic Alliances.