Panzura – Distributed Locking & Cloud Gateway for CAD

I have been watching the multi-site distributed NAS space for some years now. There have been some interesting products including Netapp’s Flexcache which looked nice but never really seemed to get market traction, and similarly IBM Global Active Cloud Engine (Panache) which was released as a feature of SONAS and Storwize V7000 Unified. Microsoft have played on the edge of this field more successfully with DFS Replication although that does not handle locking. Other technologies that encroach on this space are Microsoft Sharepoint and also WAN acceleration technologies like Microsoft Branchcache and Riverbed.

What none of these have been very good at however is solving the problem of distributed collaborative authoring of large complex multi-layered documents with high performance and sturdy locking. For example cross-referenced CAD drawings.

It’s no surprise that the founders of Panzura came from a networking background (Aruba, Alteon) since the issues to be solved are those that are introduced by the network. Panzura is a global file system tuned for CAD files and it’s not unusual to see Panzura sites experience file load times less than one tenth or sometimes even one hundredth of what they were prior to Panzura being deployed.

Rather than just provide efficient file locking however, Panzura has taken the concept to the Cloud, so that while caching appliances can be deployed to each work site, the main data repository can be in Amazon S3 or Azure for example. Panzura now claims to be the only proven global file locking solution that solves cross-site collaboration issues of applications like Revit, AutoCAD, Civil3D, and Bentley MicroStation as well as SOLIDWORKS CAD and Siemens NX PLM applications. The problems of collaboration in these environments are well-known to CAD users.

Panzura has been growing rapidly, with 400% revenue growth in 2013 and they have just come off another record quarter and a record year for 2014. Back in 2013 they decided to focus their energies on the Architectural, Engineering & Construction (so-called AEC) markets since that was where the technology delivered the greatest return on customer investment. In that space they have been growing more than 1000% per year.

ViFX recently successfully supplied Panzura to an international engineering company based in New Zealand. If you have problems with shared CAD file locking, please contact ViFX to see how we can solve the problem using Panzura.