Azure Backup is suitable for companies of various sizes, with varying amounts of data. The cost of the investment should be thought out carefully so that there are no bad surprises with unnecessary files going to Azure Backup. The interface is friendly and easy to configure and it does not require your company to have a backup expert. It is highly recommended for companies with smaller number of servers and better if the servers are already running in an Azure environment.
Panzura works well for companies that have a high amount of data with cross site collaboration being done. The caching ensures you don't need huge investments of storage at each site and the cloud storage ensures high availability over what can be done locally. Also helps eliminate duplicate data across sites and/or small variations in the same data.
Azure Backup is fast! Coupled with the fact that Microsoft created Azure and Windows - these two operate phenomenally together!
Administering the backups inside of Azure is a breeze. The ability to mount, restore entire backups, or recover files, has been made very easy. You do not have to download any media to recover something, you do this all in the cloud and it gets mounted in Microsoft's systems. Making this process less than a quarter of the time you would have spent with your 'other' backup solutions.
Backup vaults should ask if you want to send notifications when you first set it up, there have been a couple of times when I noticed a month later that, backup job failures were not configured to send email notifications.
I would like to see more connectors. Tie in to traditional block storage or NAS. Additional cloud connectors to products like Hitachi Content Platform.
I would like to see a collaborative product created between Panzura and Riverbed. I envision an almost perfect small footprint ROBO solution where Riverbed provides the compute+WAN optimization and Panzura provides the storage/risiliancy components. Combine the boxes into a single 4U solution and you have a near perfect product for remote offices.
One of the differentials of the solution is the high level of guarantee and support of the Azure Backup solution. Microsoft is a reference in a technology company with a highly trained support team and helps us with any questions or technical problems with the tool. Service is fast and efficient with trained engineers.
Hands down support is the best part of Panzura. Their techs are always helpful, always knowledgeable, and consistently solve complex problems quickly. You can definitely tell they hire their support folks from the top tier of other companies and they go above and beyond what I have come to expect in terms of support compared to other companies.
Azure Backup works on Azure, the most famous of the cloud systems that the whole world has switched to, which is now a very large part of the Microsoft ecosystem that we have been used to using for years. Therefore, it is less tiring to use the additional service of an infrastructure that we already use, even if it is a part of it, which can be easily integrated with existing systems, which is one of the most important issues we IT professionals pay attention to. For this reason, we wanted to swim in familiar waters instead of another brand.
