Maureen O'Gara

Panzura, a start-up with global cloud storage solutions, has gotten three patents on its widgetry from the US Patent and Trademark Office.

• No. 8,306,948 - "Global Deduplication File System"
• No. 8,341,363 - "Efficient Cloud Network Attached Storage"
• No. 8,356,016 - "Forwarding File-System-Level Information to a Storage Management System"

The company says the new patents recognize the underlying technology of its Panzura Operating System, which forms the core of its Global Cloud Storage System. It says it's the industry's first storage solution to bring advanced NAS capabilities to a distributed, cloud-integrated storage tier, providing a globally distributed storage system with LAN-like performance.

It's supposed to break the onsite storage expansion cycle while eliminating storage sprawl that inhibits interaction, centralization and productivity.

Called "NetApp in the Sky" by analysts, Panzura makes cloud storage local in a seamless, intuitive NAS solution that allows enterprises to scale with growth, share files across geographies, tier storage for maximum value and reduce risk from data loss or theft.

"Global Deduplication File System" covers techniques for exchanging deduplication data among devices to reduce the amount of duplicate data stored in a distributed file system, including extensive use of snapshot and metadata sharing. Panzura says the uniqueness of this technology stems from its truly global implementation across geographically dispersed locations on a massive scale.

"Efficient Cloud Network Attached Storage" covers techniques for sending incremental data and metadata snapshots between a federation of cloud controllers that cache and ensure data consistency for data stored in a distributed file system.

"Forwarding File-System-Level Information to a Storage Management System" covers techniques for forwarding file system-level requests received by an existing application-layer network protocol implementation to a distributed storage management system, thereby presenting an abstraction of one global extensible file-system while preserving the abstraction of high-speed local data access.

Panzura CEO Randy Chou said, "These patents are further validation that our solution is uniquely capable of addressing the demands of the modern globally distributed enterprise with unparalleled leading edge-technology."

Panzura optimizes enterprise data storage management and distribution in the cloud, making cloud storage simple and secure. It seamlessly combines the flexibility, performance and productivity benefits of distributed storage with the manageability, security and cost benefits of centralized storage, overcoming fundamental "administrator vs user" and "budget vs performance" conflicts. With Panzura, data location no longer affects usage.

The company was started in 2006 by founding members of Aruba Networks' software team and has raised $33 million from Khosla Ventures, Matrix Partners, Opus Capital and CTTV Investments LLC (Chevron). Recent customer wins include the Justice Department and Dreamworks. It partners with cloud storage providers such as Amazon, EMC, Google, HP Cloud and Nirvanix.