Specifically, the new patents cover:

"Since the beginning, Panzura has consistently led innovation in hybrid cloud storage, and this grant of eight patents is yet another demonstration of our leadership," said John Taylor, co-founder and CTO at Panzura. "Our distributed cloud file system for object storage provides customers the opportunity to start reaping the benefits of hybrid cloud storage almost immediately: more effective management of their valuable and ever-growing unstructured data, while simultaneously enjoying a cost reduction of up to 70 percent."

About PanzuraAdding over two petabytes of enterprise storage under management per month, Panzura is a market leader in enterprise hybrid cloud storage. Panzura hybrid cloud storage software seamlessly combines the economics, capacity, and business model of cloud storage with the flexibility, performance, and features of enterprise storage. Using Panzura, enterprises shift from an antiquated storage status quo model into the cloud and unlock the power of data. Organizations like Milwaukee Tool, American College of Radiology, and Chevron use Panzura for active archive, hybrid cloud NAS, and cross-site collaboration. Please visit http://www.panzura.com for further information.

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To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/panzura-extends-leadership-in-hybrid-cloud-storage-with-eight-new-patents-300465976.html

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Cloud Storage is certainly not a new thing, with the depute of Dropbox about ten years ago, but now that the world is more internet connected than it has ever been people having some variety in their options of cloud storage.

This service has advanced quite significantly since its humble beginnings and its main attracting point comes from its ability to have all your data available when you switch devices, but it also ensures their safety in the shape of backups.

Currently, there are three main cloud storage services which are good at doing their job, but choosing between them can be quite tricky. All three have their pros and cons, their quirks and traits.

Dropbox cloud storage

Dropbox has been released in 2007 and deserves respect for its longevity and innovation. It is unknown how long it would have taken for someone else to develop it and the subsequent sharing culture that has formed thanks to it.

Dropbox was lucky enough to also be a good service, and it didnt fall in the mantra of first doesnt mean best. It did have its periods where issues were constant, but thats to be expected with newer technologies.

It is supported on Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, Android and Windows Mobile. You have 2GB of initial free storage, with the option to upgrade to 1TB for a $8.25 monthly payment. As for special features which you can expect from Dropbox, you can find a SSL/TLS and 256-bit AES encryption, password protection, integration with the latest Microsoft Office, and more.

Google Drive

Released in 2012, Google Drive is widely considered as the 2nd best cloud storage system, or the 2nd best known at the very least. This is in no small part due to its integration with the various services that Google also offers.

If you are a fan of Googles services, specifically Office Suite, then Google Drive should also be part of your tools as they benefit from each other. Thanks to this, its considered one of the more user-friendly cloud storage services available, and it can be expanded further with the use of other tools and plugins. However, this can also be a potential drawback. It requires you to trust Google to keep your data and confidentiality safe.

Supported systems for Google drive include Web, Mac, Windows, iOS and Android. The initial free storage is a decent 15GB, with the option to increase it to 100GB, 1 TB, 10 TB, 20 TB and 30 TB. This would be an advantageous cloud service for businesses.

OneDrive

For note-taking efficiency look no further than OneNote. OneNote is also completely free and doesnt have features locked out for free users. To make things better, every note is saved on OneDrive.

While initially it didnt bare the name of OneDrive, SkyDrive was its original name, Microsoft has launched its own cloud storage service in 2007. OneDrive doesnt have any significant bad parts to it, but its quite specific in its design and the situations where it would be recommended to use. The first one is where you are already using (and paying for) the Microsoft Office 365, being that OneDrive is included in the package. The second one is where you want to have more free storage but you want to avoid making use of Googles storage.

It is available for the Windows, Web, Android, iOS, Mac and Windows Mobile platforms and comes with an initial 5 GB of free storage. You can opt for an a 50GB or 1TB upgrade. You are limited to files no larger than 10 G and has real-time collaboration with the OneNote, Excel, PowerPoint and Word.

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Dropbox vs. Google Drive vs. OneDrive - Best Cloud Storage Comparison - Blorge

1

Description: Top security features, unlimited storage space and 24/7 support.

9.8

2

Description: Competitive prices, automatic backup, and easy setup process.

9.7

3

Description: Includes user friendly interface with top-notch Blowfish encryption.

9.3

4

Description: Multi-device sync capability, unlimited storage, and high quality tech support.

9.2

5

Description: Powerful recovery options and smart compression set in place.

9.1

6

Description: Offers any size business optimal storage and simple file sharing services.

9.1

7

Description: Unlimited storage and back up solutions. Also has external drive backup options.

9.1

8

Description: Secure and easy to use browser interface and restore manager

9.1

9

Description: Best for sending large files and storing a lot of data in cloud storage.

9

10

Description: Unlimited plans and synchronized filing available for multiple devices.

8.9

When you start building a new website, integrating cloud storage is probably not something youve considered, but the truth of the matter is that cloud storage services are useful for everyone. There are plenty of options when it comes to web builder hosting plans, and cloud storage is something you should take into consideration when deciding which plan to choose. The primary goal here at Best 10 is to make it easier and less stressful for website builders to find exactly what plan works best for their project.

Cloud storage is an alternative option for storing documents, photos, and other files. Cloud storage allows you to save and access your files from nearly any location, as long as you can access the internet. Fromthis standpoint that you no longer have to worry about losing files from your computer if you encounter a virus, natural disaster, or damaged hard drive. By using remote servers outfitted with the best encryption software, your files will always be safe and secure.

Lets face it; cloud storage was not originally developed with website building in mind, but it can be one of the best tools website builders can take advantage offor the additional piece of mind. For instance, owning aserver doesnt necessarily guarantee that youll be optimally set up or provided with all of the services. For example, the server company that you may be using may not provide backup capabilities for your server. By using cloud storage, you can create the redundancies you need as well as backups for your server and any projects you are working. By choosing a cloud storage company that fits your needs, you can ensure that you are getting the security and safety features that are necessary to keep your business running as smoothly as possible. It also makes it much faster and easier to access any and all of your files from virtually anywhere, as long as youre able to connect to the internet.

Cloud storage services can be directly linked to your server very easily. This makes it incredibly easy to automatically back up any projects you are currently working on, as well as creating backups of any websites that you have created that have already gone live. Some things to consider when choosing a cloud storage provider are compatibility with your server, as well as the amount of storage that is available. Youll want a plan that has enough storage space to back up your entire server in case disaster strikes. One of the biggest fears with website builders who have their own servers is something happening to that server. This could be anything from a simple hard drive failure,virus, or something more severe like a fire or other natural disaster destroying the device. By syncing your server with a cloud storage system, you will always have the backups that you need should you face unfortunate circumstances.

Weve made it easy for you to view the 10 best cloud storage providers for website builders right here, as well as providing links for you to see full reviews on each of them. There are different criteria for which they are rated; from technical support and customer service to cloud storage space and features. Take a look at the overall score to get a general idea of what each company is all about, and take a look at the reviews and forum to get more detailed information from actual customers as well as experts in the field about each provider.

We use a very thorough ten-point system to check the quality of each and every review before we post them onto our website. By using this process, were able to maintain consistency, helping to ensure that we provide all of our readers with the information that they need to choose the best cloud storage in the most efficient manner possible. In addition to the reviews given by experts in their field, we also have an open forum for any customer who has used the service so that they can provide their own personal review. This not only gives you a look at what is presented from both a technical standpoint and user-friendly guide but also acts as a way to give an entirely unbiased opinion. Also, we have an easy to use comparison tool that helps you look at several different cloud storage providers at the same time. This allows you to see how much space you get for a price, as well as the reliability of the cloud storage company. An overall five star rating, with five being the highest, is used for each cloud storage service, which means a quick glance can give you a general idea of what each company can provide.

Lets take a closer look at the different categories that are covered in our reviews

Weve all heard the phrase you get what you pay for, and its no different with cloud storage. There are plenty of free cloud storage options, but you wont get much storage space with these and may miss out on all kinds of great features that can help with website building. And if you choose to sign up for one of the less expensive plans, you may not be getting your moneys worth. When calculating the best value for your budget and projects, you must not only consider how much storage space you are allotted but also take into consideration the companys reliability and thinks like safety and security as well.

The uptime and reliability of a company are determined based on statistical data. Most of the time, a cloud storage company will have a 99.9% uptime. It is not uncommon for some companies to fall below this level on occasion, as unexpected circumstances come into play. This is something that should be considered when choosing a cloud storage company, especially when incorporating this data into website building.

If you ever have a problem or need a question answered, its imperative that youre able to reach a customer service representative. All cloud storage companies are rated in how quickly someone responds, whether or not a problem was resolved, as well as how fast this was completed, in addition to the helpfulness of the representative. This test is conducted using phone calls as well as with online chats.

Technical support and customer service are often lumped into the same category, but we understand the difference between the two and how important it can be to your site to have the best of both. Technical support is the team you want to talk to when you have a more complex problem and need to speak with someone who knows the ins and outs of the programs and services. These people must not only be knowledgeable and efficient, but friendly and helpful as well.

The number of features offered by any cloud storage company is not as important as the quality of each one. You dont want to sign up with a company that offers a lot of different features if those features arent any use to you. Instead, choose one that focuses on the features you need while still being a good value. Some things that you might want to consider are the ability to change your storage space amount, as well as the encryption software that is used to maintain privacy.

Cloud storage space is one of the most important categories to take into consideration when determining which cloud storage company is the best for your website building needs, especially when considering the value. Its always better to have more storage space than you think you need, especially when it fits into your budget. Many companies will allow you to move to the next tier if you unexpectedly fill up your current plan, but you may incur extra fees by doing so.

Cloud storage should not be an overly sophisticated service to use, even if you are not very technically proficient. To determine a services ease of use, we evaluate them from both a technical standpoint as well as from that of a general user.

The overall rating given to each cloud service company is calculated based on the individual scores of the previously mentioned categories. This allows readers to quickly weed out any service that may not fit their needs and can make it simpler to look more closely at a few companies to determine which would be best.

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Top Cloud Storage Reviews | Best 10 Website Builders

Yaniv Romem is co-founder and CTO and Tom Leyden is VP of corporate marketing at Excelero

Tech giants such as Amazon, Facebook, and Google have redefined IT for web-scale applications, leveraging standard servers and shared-nothing architectures to ensure maximum operational efficiency, flexibility, and reliability. As new application workloads cloud, mobile, IoT, machine learning, and real-time analytics drive the need for faster and more scalable storage, enterprises are seeking to optimize their infrastructures in the same way as these tech giants.

Exceleros NVMesha unified, scale-out, software-defined, block storage solution that runs on industry standard serverswas designed in response to these needs. NVMesh leverages NVMe high-performance flash, a highlydistributed architecture, intelligent clients that minimize cluster communications, and a proprietary storage access protocol that bypasses the CPU on storage targets.

The result is a high-performance block storage system, with extremely low latency overhead. In a nutshell, server access to remote storage devices is a mere 5 microseconds (s) slower than access to local devices, and that overhead is mostly in the network. Further, NVMesh can be flexibly deployed as converged (combining compute and storage) or disagreggated (storage server or JBOD) infrastructure, and scales simply and granularly by adding drives or nodes to the cluster.

As storage has moved from the mechanical world of hard drives to the silicon world of SSDs, we have experienced rapid improvements in performance, capacities, and reliability. Today, the absolute tops in flash storage interfaces is NVMe, which is powered by a much faster protocol that eliminates the bottleneck of ATA and SCSI.

NVMe essentially gives us a much better way to access the performance of flash both todays SSDs and future innovations. By being placed on the PCIe bus, NVMe opens up a whole new range of opportunities. It can provide the performance, latency, and power efficiencies required by todays massive web and supercomputing applications as well as powerful data analytics environments such as industrial IoT.

In this article well take a deep dive into the technology that Excelero engineers developed to take advantage of NVMe and the paradigm shift to server-based, software-defined storage.

Excelero designed NVMesh to meet the block storage requirements of modern scale-out applications, leveraging state-of-the-art flash on standard servers. The key requirements for such environments are:

NVMesh enables customers to design server-based SAN infrastructures for the most demanding enterprise and cloud-scale applications, leveraging standard servers and multiple tiers of flash. The primary benefit of NVMesh is that it enables converged infrastructure by logically disaggregating storage from compute.

NVMesh features a distributed block layer that allows unmodified applications to use pooled NVMe storage devices across a network at local speeds and latencies. Distributed NVMe storage resources are pooled with the ability to dynamically create arbitrary virtual volumes that can be striped, mirrored, or both. Volumes can be spread over multiple hosts and utilized by any host running the NVMesh block client. In short, applications can enjoy the latency, throughput, and IOPs of a local NVMe device while at the same time getting the benefits of centralized, redundant, and centrally managed storage.

A key component of Exceleros NVMesh is the patented Remote Direct Drive Access (RDDA) functionality, which bypasses the CPU and, as a result, avoids the noisy neighbor effect on application performance. The shift of data services from centralized CPU to complete client-side distribution enables linear scalability, provides deterministic performance for applications, and allows customers to maximize the utilization of their flash drives.

NVMesh is deployed as a virtual, distributed, non-volatile array. It supports both converged and disaggregated architectures, giving customers freedom in their architectural design.

NVMesh consists of four main software components: the NVMesh Target Module, the Topology Manager (TOMA), the Intelligent Client Block Driver, and the centralized management system.

The NVMesh Target Module identifies storage hardware, such as NVMe drives and compatible NICs, and sets up RDDA pathways into the NVMe drives on behalf of the storage clients. The module runs on target nodes, which are physical nodes containing non-volatile storage elements to be shared. Once the Target Module sets up the connections from clients to the NVMe drives, it steps back and hence is not in the data path. The Target Module is also involved in error detection and handling.

The Topology Manager, which comes bundled with the target module and runs on the same hardware elements, executes in user space and provides volume control plane functionality. TOMA tracks the activity of drives and storage target modules to maintain seamless volume activity upon element failure. Upon recognizing a failure, the topology manager performs the actions required to ensure data consistency. It also manages and engages in recovery operations upon element resumption or replacement.

The Intelligent Client Block Driver implements block device functionality for storage consumers. This software runs on client nodes. A host or node that has one or more NVMe devices to share and also participates as a client is called a converged node. Converged nodes run both the block storage client and the storage target module. If desired, the storage management module can also run on a client, target, or converged node.

The centralized management system provides, yes, configuration and monitoring functionality. In addition to a web GUI, it provides a RESTful API management interface for integration with data center management systems and orchestration mechanisms.

Being a true software-defined storage solution, NVMesh separates the control path and data path. Most of NVMeshs control path functionality is executed by the storage management modules, which avoid broadcasting management communications to ensure scalability. The control path functionality includes:

The data path serves the actual storage I/O operations, which are sent from the block storage client to the storage devices using several mechanisms. NVMe devices are accessed at local speeds using Exceleros patented RDDA protocol. Other target block devices, such as SATA SSDs, are accessed using standard RDMA queue pairs to interact with the storage target module that will subsequently perform the I/O operation. NVMf devices are accessed directly using the NVMf protocol.

Besides Exceleros RDDA protocol, NVMesh supports the open protocol NVMf as a wire transport. NVMf may be preferable from the standards perspective, but is less desirable in terms of performance overhead, as using it will require invocation of target side software (and CPU). RDDA typically provides better access latency without requiring target-side CPU usage.

Employing RDDA provides an immediate latency benefit of 10 microseconds (or more) compared to kernel-based NVMe-over-Fabrics (more on performance below). RDDA significantly reduces load on the target side by avoiding running the kernel software stack including potentially computationally expensive interrupt handling.

Lastly, NVMf is a low latency protocol for NVMe over a network fabricits not a storage solution. The NVMf client and target allow you to access drives remotely, but do nothing for adding redundancy, logical volumes, failover, or centralized monitoring and management.

A key benefit of RDDA is that it bypasses the CPU on targets. As a result, planning resource allocation for applications is simpler and more consistent. A second benefit is the ability to spread data across failure zones for high availability, which calls for distributed data layout. Client-side storage service implementation enables single hop data access also when the data is spread across disparate physical entities.

Excelero NVMesh was designed to scale naturally. Targeting larger data centers with upwards of 100,000 converged nodes, NVMesh was designed to avoid any centralized capability in the data path that could become a bottleneck. This means no centralized metadata or lock management. Client, target, and management functionalities are built as scale-out technologies as well. Because it is critical to ensure that the networking pattern supports web-scale deployments, clients are completely independent. Knowledge sharing among clients is rare and occurs indirectly and anonymously via targets. Client independence ensures easy client scaling.

Storage targets communicate only with other targets that are protecting the same data. Volumes are spread out in a way that minimizes the amount of such communication. In contrast, other products spread the volumes in a way that has every node mirroring something from every other node. Typically, a target will have to communicate with only a handful of other nodes, even in a large-scale environment, due to this volume allocation strategy.

Further, cross-target communication is limited to keep-alives, quorum communication, and rebuilds.Data protection is done by the clients themselves, with the number of elements participating in data protection of any specific stored data element limited to reduce system chatter and enable wide scaling.

Centralized management is comprised of a stateless web serving framework (Node.js) and a transactional, scale-out data store (MongoDB) on the back end. This ensures that the management framework has the required scale-out and failover characteristics to support the largest data centers.

The client-target communication pattern rests on the intelligence of the Intelligent Client block driver. Clients know to approach the correct group of targets thereby reducing both the number of network hops and the number of communication lines. The result is that the number of connections is a small multiple of domain size.

The performance of storage systems is influenced by many elements, including the storage hardware components, the servers, the network, and the efficiency of the software. NVMesh was designed to let applications enjoy the full performance, capacity, and processing power of the underlying servers and storage. The software was designed to add virtually no latency and not impact the target CPU. As NVMesh is a pure software-defined storage solution, performance varies with choices made by the customer. To give an idea of what NVMesh is capable of, we provide a brief summary of tests performed during alive demo for an audience of tech analysts:

The tests were performed on about $13,000 worth of hardware, including

The system generated 2.5M IOps for 4KB random writes and 4.5M IOps for 4KB random reads. Random write average response time was less than 350 microseconds and the random read average response time was 227 microseconds. During the 4.5M IOps random read benchmark, the storage target CPU was at 0.3 percent utilization (mostly running Linux services to display process status).

Excelero NVMesh is a software-defined storage solution designed to meet the requirements of web-scale applications. It leverages state-of-the-art NVMe flash and industry standard servers to deliver consistent, low-latency, high-performance block storage that also meets the cost, scalability, flexibility, and reliability requirements of the modern data center.

NVMesh facilitates performant and cost-effective converged deployments by avoiding noisy neighbor disruptions and effectively disaggregating compute and storage logically without having to do so physically. The key is a new architecture that combines direct access to remote storage devices by clients, a client-side storage service implementation, and a scalable communication pattern.

Scalability is achieved by careful design choices for the communication patterns and scale-out components for the management, control, and data planes. And by providing a block storage API and volume definition flexibility, NVMesh allows administrators to decide how to balance performance, data layout, and availability in the way that meets their requirements.

New Tech Forum provides a venue to explore and discuss emerging enterprise technology in unprecedented depth and breadth. The selection is subjective, based on our pick of the technologies we believe to be important and of greatest interest to InfoWorld readers. InfoWorld does not accept marketing collateral for publication and reserves the right to edit all contributed content. Send all inquiries tonewtechforum@infoworld.com.

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