Core 2.0 Data-Aware Scale-Out NAS Software and SSD/HDD Hybrid Appliances From Qumulo

Qumulo, Inc. introduced Qumulo Core 2.0 and three QC-Series hybrid storage appliances, the QC40, QC104, and QC260.

Company’s software and hardware design enables customers to ride the commodity hardware curve with an agile platform that can readily be refreshed with the latest hardware for performance, capacity and cost benefits.

“Qumulo Core delivers industry-leading efficiency for unstructured data workloads via erasure coding and high density HDD drives,” said Jeff Cobb, VP, product management, Qumulo. “Successfully using drives this dense requires a fundamental rethinking of the way that scale-out file storage uses disk drives. With our flash-first hybrid design and sequential rebuild technology, Qumulo Core provides built-in performance acceleration while still delivering on less than one hour rebuild times regardless of file size, even with 6TB, 8TB, and now the highest density 10TB drives.”

Introducing Qumulo Core 2.0 – Data-aware scale-out NAS software
Core has real-time data analytics built directly into the file system, giving enterprises a view of their data and storage resources at scale. With greater visibility into which data is most valuable, where it is stored, which users or applications are accessing what files, what should be archived, backed up or deleted, and why data grows, Customers report significant gains in workflow performance and storage efficiency.

New features and benefits in Core 2.0 include:

• Scalable, efficient, and resilient data protection with erasure coding

• Scalable – enables the use of the highest capacity HDDs (10TB, 8TB, 6TB HGST helium drives) with less than one hour rebuild times for uninterrupted operations at scale

• Efficient – Up to 33% increase in usable storage capacity including the ability to efficiently handle tens of billions of small and large files

• Resilient – withstands up to two concurrent drive failures or one storage node failure without any data loss

• Capacity trends analytics

• Provides intelligently aggregated insights for storage data management and capacity planning

• Gives immediate answers to how storage capacity usage has changed in the past 72 hours, 30 days, and 52 weeks

• Users can drill down to understand which files have been added and deleted by path

• Users can now answer questions of “Where did all of my storage capacity go?” and “When will I run out of storage space and why?”

Riding commodity hardware curve
With QC40 and QC260 hybrid appliances, the company will ship the Ultrastar He10 10TB highest density HDD drives from HGST. The firm also introduced the QC104, a new mid-capacity hybrid appliance.

Features and benefits include:

• Scalable – modular building blocks create a single file system with linear scalability in storage capacity and performance

• Efficient – maximizes datacenter rack density, floorspace, and power

• Economic – high capacity storage with the performance of hybrid SSD/HDD architecture

Qumolo appliances

With this introduction, the line-up of QC-Series hybrid storage appliances will feature five SKUs, with starting capacities spanning from 96TB to over 1PB of raw storage. The QC-Series 1U appliances (QC24 and QC40) give users a choice between lower-cost entry requirements and higher performance/higher capacity needs. The QC-Series 4U appliances (QC104, QC208 and QC260) give users a choice between cost-optimized requirements and the highest density, lowest cost per GB data-aware scale-out NAS solution.

Qumulo Core is in production in commercial HPC and large-scale unstructured data environments, with customers including Ant Farm, Atomic Fiction, Blind Studios, Densho, FotoKem, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, MSG Networks, Sinclair Oil, Sportvision, TELUS Studios, UConn Health, University of Utah Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, Vaisala, ZOIC Studios.

Availability and pricing:

• Core 2.0 software is available.

• The QC40, QC104, and QC260 appliances will be available in Q2. Pricing for an entry 4-node QC24 cluster running Core 2.0 starts at $50,000.

“Over the past year, Qumulo has proved conclusively that if you have an application that wants speedy, low latency access to billions of small and large files, in a multi-petabyte level, scale out storage system, then Qumulo QC-series is a top contender. Now with erasure coding added to their latest release of software, the capacity efficiency and data resiliency has gotten even better. What’s not to like.” said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst, Taneja Group

“As disk drive capacities continue to grow and 10TB drives become more commonplace, using traditional approaches for data protection, like RAID, will become more and more untenable. Qumulo’s addition of Reed-Solomon erasure codes to its Qumulo Core software will enable it to provide scalable, efficient and resilient data protection at scale. Approaches like this are critical capabilities in order for high capacity HDD drives to be adopted into the enterprise.” said George Crump, lead analyst and founder, Storage Switzerland.