NAB: Qumulo Introduces Hybrid Storage Platform, Advanced File System Features, and Accelerates Momentum in M&A

At the 2019 NAB Show, Qumulo, Inc. announced growth in the media and entertainment (M&E) market, as well as performance increases and new advanced enterprise protocol capabilities.

Its hybrid cloud file storage will be featured. The company will be providing live demonstrations of its software’s capabilities in a 4K editing environment, as well as its recently-announced CloudStudio and CloudContinuity products, which enable media and entertainment organisations of any size to scale production into the public cloud.

Qumulo will also showcased its software’s performance capabilities for streaming, as well as real-time data analytics, and the ability to enable burst rendering to the cloud.

Qumulo file storage is being rapidly adopted in M&E use cases including broadcast, visual effects, post-production and archive. A sample of the notable customers: 9 Story Media Group, Ant Farm, Atomic Fiction, Awesometown, Blind Studios, Crafty Apes, The DAVE School, Deluxe VR, DreamWorks Animation, Eight Solutions, Falcon’s Creative, FotoKem, FuseFX, Intelligent Creatures, Mr. X, MSG Networks, Pipeline Studios, Pure Imagination, REDLAB, RodeoFX, Sportvision, and ZOIC Studios.

Introducing the C-72T hardware platform,
changing the economics of high-performance file storage at-scale
Qumulo introduced a new addition to its storage hardware platform options.  The C-72T, which delivers a 200% increase in read performance over previous entry-level nodes, and a 300% increase in storage density over previous high-performance hybrid SSD/HDD platform options.

The C-72T enables customers to start at less than 200TB of capacity and scales to beyond 3PB in 1U, linearly scalable increments. Many other solutions often require organisations to select a large hardware configuration in order to be economical, or choose a small solution that doesn’t scale.

“For too long, file customers have been forced to choose between capacity versus entry point, performance versus price, or scale versus incremental cost. Qumulo believes customers shouldn’t have to make those choices,” said Molly Presley, director of product marketing, Qumulo.  

Qumulo’s file system achieves performance increases
It is designed for performance, primary file storage and active archive environments. The company is constantly improving and enhancing its software to deliver more performance and capacity per dollar for its customers.  As part of Qumulo’s software-defined model, any customer can take advantage of these ongoing improvements, whether they purchased a system a month, a year, or several years ago.

Fim’s software innovation has achieved several improvements to its performance over the past 12 months, including:

• More than 2x reduction in latency over both SMB and NFS;
• A 2x increase in throughput performance;
• Delivering the performance of SSD for the price of disk. In all Qumulo platforms, all writes go to SSD and through the advanced cache, 62% of reads are predicted and pre-fetched to SSD.

Introducing Advancements in Qumulo Cross-Protocol Capabilities
Enterprises have high standards on their requirements for NAS protocol implementation. Qumulo continues to advance its ability to integrate with name services, automate permission handling, and offer the protocol support needed for the complex environments.  

Today, the company is announcing automated Cross-Protocol Permissions (XPP) capabilities which allow teams to work seamlessly across computing platforms and networking protocols. System administrators can now allow users on Windows, Linux, and macOS platforms to safely collaborate without requiring the system admin to create elaborate permissions safeguards and inheritance schemes.

XPP lets users access and collaborate on the same sets of files over Server Message Block (SMB) and NFS protocols without concern over permissions compatibility.

Previously, system admins would be required to segment users by protocol or set up elaborate permissions inheritance schemes to prevent users from inadvertently breaking file permissions and locking others out. With XPP, admins can spend less time managing, troubleshooting, and repairing permissions issues, and can allow cross-protocol workgroups to collaborate across the Qumulo file system.

Introducing S3 Interface to Qumulo Storage with MinIO Partnership
In response to customer demand for S3 protocol support, Qumulo has announced a certified solution with MinIO, Inc. for its Minio open source object storage server. This solution will enable customers to run both file and object workloads from the same storage infrastructure.

“We believe MinIO is a compelling solution for our customers looking to leverage a single piece of storage infrastructure to power all of their own workloads, and for those looking to take advantage of both a modern protocol as well as the economics and performance file storage can provide,” said Presley.

For information about S3 compatibility, and expected performance, see this tutorial on how to deploy a MinIO gateway with Qumulo’s hybrid cloud file storage.

Available immediately:

• C-72T through Qumulo-certified channel partners
• S3 interface support in partnership with MinIO
• Qumulo file system with all referenced performance advancements XPP is included in version 2.11.4 of Qumulo’s software