How It Works

Pancetera runs as a virtual Linux appliance on a single host alongside your other VMs. Unlike solutions with specialized hardware and software, Pancetera is easily installed in minutes and managed just like any other VM. A single virtual appliance can access multiple data stores across numerous hypervisors, so there is no need to install an instance of Pancetera on every host in your virtual environment.

A single instance of Pancetera spans all your SAN, NAS and DAS storage – unifying an otherwise heterogeneous storage pool. Any application capable of utilizing a CIFS share or NFS export sees the Pancetera SmartView access point as a network file system. New VMs are automatically detected and included in the storage view, so you never have to worry that you’ve overlooked an important change.

When you access virtual storage through Pancetera SmartView, our patent-pending SmartRead™ technology eliminates unnecessary disk I/O, reducing storage and network load associated with management workloads.

SmartRead™ works by reading the file system metadata from the Guest OS to determine which parts of the virtual machine disk file are redundant or no longer in use. With progressive optimization, Pancetera will be able to determine which blocks are live, have changed or are redundant so only unique blocks are read from your primary storage. Pancetera recreates a normalized VM that is ready to boot while consolidating active data and synthesizing a dedupe optimized VMDK file. This has obvious benefits for backup, replication, WAN acceleration, data deduplication, file scans and other I/O intensive data management functions.

Pancetera Unite Installs In 5 Minutes

Pancetera has been designed using the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), which is an open standard for the creation and distribution of virtual appliances. This standard is independent of both processor architecture and host, allowing Pancetera to run in a broad range of hypervisors.

Pancetera currently supports VMware ESXi, ESX 3.5 and 4.x