Jimmy Tam, CEO of Peer Software recently outlined his company and how it helps enterprise customers to manage and secure the massive growth in storage capacity (see my Figure above for the annual worldwide shipped capacity of HDD, NAND and DRAM since 2003).
Peer Software was founded in 1993. A private company based in Centreville, Virginia, it currently has 5 branch offices in Germany (Ulm and Munich), the UK, California and Bedford, New Hampshire.
It has technical alliances with Nutanix, Scality, NetApp, Citrix, Microsoft, Bridgeworks and Liquidware and recently announced a strategic partnership with Pulsar Security for the latter to monitor and analyze emerging and evolving ransomware and malware attack patterns on unstructured data.
Peer’s Global File Service (PeerGFS) is its main solution – a software product providing real-time replication of file changes to enable active-active global file sharing. It allows users to:
- Replicate, synchronize, share and back-up files across major storage systems (currently Windows, NetApp and Nutanix File, as well as Dell EMC Isilon, VNX, Unity),
- Manage data held on public clouds through its support for object formats NetApp StorageGrid, Nutanix Objects, AWS S3 and Azure Blob,
- Monitor file activity for malicious activities in its partnership with Pulsar (see above) and others, and
- Give their users local access to shared file data, locking others out to avoid version conflicts.
It works with Microsoft’s Distributed File System Namespace (DFS-N) to unify their storage, both on premise or in the cloud. It also includes the Dynamic Storage Utilization (DSU) facility, which can be used to build local file caches on edge servers based in branch offices.
Peer’s other products are:
- PeerSync Migration, which provides data migration of Microsoft SMB and CIFS file data through fast data seeding, a reduced cut-over window through the use of real-time replication and the ability to split or merge file data from different servers or volumes during migration. It doesn’t require a final scan, unlike some competitors’ products.
- File System Analyzer (PeerFSA) – a free-to-use product for analyzing the files held on any SMB server, providing time-based, user, file type and directory reports.
Peer’s typical customers are multi-site enterprises with large distributed teams, using storage systems from a number of suppliers, experiencing exponential data growth and in the process of moving some workloads to the cloud. Its competitors include CTERA, Hammerspace, IBM Spectrum Scale (GPFS), Nasuni and Panzura.
GTS is doesn’t cover the whole waterfront; for instance it works with file and object – but not block – storage, only currently runs on Windows (although it will add Linux later in 2022) and doesn’t yet work on all storage system arrays. Its file-locking feature is great, although users will need to test and make some adjustments when using it alongside pre-existing application-specific file-locking. Nevertheless installing GFS is an excellent way for enterprise IT managers to enhance storage management, protection and resilience – very useful in a world of massive unstructured data growth.