The latest example of consumer technology finding use behind the firewall comes from Panzura Inc., which has turned to Google Maps in order to ease the maintenance of geographically distributed storage environments powered by its file system. The new CloudFS Console introduced for the platform today layers operational data over charts from the location service to produce a high-level overview of infrastructure.

Administrators thereby gain the ability to centrally monitor the availability of every node in their deployments, according to Panzura, as well as the data inside. That includes both files kept in permanent storage and the contents of the local cache, which can be used to temporarily hold records from other machines. The feature removes the need to repeatedly download oft-needed information from across the network, a potentially major time-saver in areas like the construction sector where a single blueprint can take hours to download.

Civil engineering outfit C&S Companies Inc. claims to have reduced the wait to under a minute in certain cases since adopting the startup’s platform about two years ago. Pinning records locally,  as Panzura puts it, has the added benefit of freeing up bandwidth for the other workloads that run alongside an organization’s file sharing workflow. The CloudFS Console visualizes the connections among the nodes in a deployment to help keep track of the different traffic streams and ensure that everything is working smoothly.

After spotting a latency spike or some other operational hiccup, an administrator can roll back the view as far back two weeks in order to try and find the starting point of the problem. They can then begin the troubleshooting process from there instead of having to reverse-engineer the issue, which can speed up the task considerably. The CloudFS Console is available immediately for customers with active support contracts at no extra charge.

Image via Panzura