Data storage vendors Cleversafe and Panzura have entered a strategic partnership to help large enterprises address the massive growth in unstructured data and connected devices. The fruits of their labor were announced at this week’s VMworld 2013 conference in San Francisco.

The two companies unveiled an enterprise-hardened network attached storage (NAS) offering that is built atop the former’s Dispersed Storage (dsNet) system, an object store appliance that utilizes erasure codes to split data into multiple “slices” that can be written to separate storage devices. The combined solution distributes these slices across multiple geographical locations using Panzura’s cloud-based file system, which lets globally distributed organizations share files across all of their sites. It also provides users with dynamic file locking, global deduplication, global snapshots and other enterprise features.

Additional features of the offering include military-grade encryption of data both in motion and at rest, and cloud-based archiving, backup, and disaster recovery. Cleversafe and Panzura claim that the platform can reduce storage costs by as much as 90 percent.

“Cleversafe delivers petabytes of big data storage with a huge savings on storage costs,” said Russ Kennedy the Vice President of Product Strategy, Marketing & Customer Solutions at Cleversafe. “By connecting Panzura’s Global Cloud Storage System to the Cleversafe storage solution, our customers get a full-featured, cloud-integrated NAS solution with a global file system and rapid data access and processing.”

Cleversafe had previously introduced Elevate, a partner program that offers incentives for value-added resellers (VAR), service providers and independent software vendors (ISV) that incorporate dsNet into their portfolios. Program benefits include market analysis, product calculators, case studies and access to an online portal that includes “exclusive solutions information” and sales and marketing material.