Panzura has raised $25 million for its global file system that stores and moves data in a fast, secure manner. Meritech Capital Partners led the D round. The company has now raised $58 million and expects to pursue an initial public offering.
Panzura is one of those plays that appeals to the enterprise CIO who looks askance at the cloud but loves saving money and helping the company use the network without employees going nuts in customer support calls about that FILE THAT TAKES FOREVER TO OPEN. Of course security is a big plus, too. But the real story here is about speed: getting that data from those files somewhere fast without having to wait for it on the other end.
Panzura does this by leveraging the Internet and the speed it can get by using SSDs in the hardware it sells. This helps move the data far faster than with mechanical disks. Snapshots of the data get replicated so documents do not need to get made again when sent to a physical server in a different location. It just gets passed across the network using the power of the Internet and its LAN environment so people can share files easily in a secure manner.
Panzura builds all of this capability into its controllers that act as replacements for traditional network attached storage, particularly from NetApp.
The service can connect to third-party cloud services for companies that are using Amazon Web Services or other providers for cloud storage.
As for its security capabilities, the Department of Justice uses it to share files from all of its 265 sites.
But the real value here is the speed. Lawyers expect security, but people just don’t tolerate the laggard ways of the old networks anymore. We live in the age of data. If that data is not moving fast then you are losing to the ones that have better mastered the art of velocity. They are just operating on another strata of the data economy that can’t be achieved with legacy systems.