Qumulo: Flash-Centric Platforms, Security Features, and Efficiency Advancements for Enterprise Unstructured Data
To capitalize on falling NVMe prices, accelerate file-based workloads, and gain real-time visibility and insight into data
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on June 26, 2019 at 2:17 pmQumulo, Inc. announced comprehensive software and hardware advancements that will help enterprises to capitalize on dynamic market conditions, including rapidly falling NVMe prices, in order to gain data center efficiencies and benefit from the increased reliability and performance of flash-based platforms.
According to industry analyst Tom Coughlin and Yole Development, NAND and DRAM prices “will decline by about 40% this year and not increase again until 2020.”
Today’s announcement underscores Qumulo’s continued commitment to delivering customer value through:
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Rapid new technology adoption – Qumulo’s software-defined architecture enables rapid platform and new storage media qualification, putting technology advancements and price reductions into the hands of users fast.
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Real-time analytics that help organizations:
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Save money – by understanding their data and its usage so they don’t need to over-provision storage.
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Save time - by accessing real-time data about their storage environment, including how it is being used and who is using it.
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Increase storage performance – by viewing billions of files and all operations in real-time to see which are consuming resources, and enabling them to take action accordingly.
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“Qumulo makes it easy for users to incorporate new technology developments both on-prem and in the cloud,” said Molly Presley, director of product marketing. “Our software-defined, hybrid cloud file system allows our users to focus on their data-driven businesses, not on managing their storage.”
Introducing new all-flash and hybrid storage platforms
“Qumulo’s consistent release of new platforms delivers the latest performance and capacity economics of hardware to users, fast,” said Dan Molina, CIO, Nth Generation, and a Qumulo reseller. “We pride ourselves in bringing solutions to our users that give their organizations the most IT advantage possible. Qumulo helps us deliver innovation fast while leveraging budgets effectively.”
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All-Flash for Performance: New P-184T
The introduction of the P-184T expands in NVMe file storage that dates back to the company’s first NVMe solution, introduced in 2017. It delivers consistently performance and scalable file storage, making it for use in industries such as HPC, life sciences, imaging, and media and entertainment post-production. It uses 100GbE and provides 184TB of raw NVMe storage capacity in 2U of rack space. This performance-packed solution scales to 225GB/s throughput in a single cluster.Qumulo has also released software enhancements delivering up to a 40% increase in write performance that is now available as a software upgrade to all currently deployed P-23T and P-92T nodes; it comes standard with all new all-flash shipments, including the P-184T.
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SSD/Disk Hybrid for Mixed Workloads: C-168T
The C-168T platform is tailored for file workloads that require a balance of performance reads and writes coupled with cost-effective capacity. It is for use cases such as large media and entertainment archives, scientific research, and AI/ML applications. It uses 25GbE and provides 168TB of raw disk storage and 3.8TB of SSD cache in 1U of rack space. -
SSD/Disk Hybrid for Active Archive: K-168T
The company is also introducing a capacity-optimized solution for archive environments. The K-168T is designed to meet the needs of video surveillance storage, PACS archives, media and entertainment archives, and HPC file archives. It uses 10GbE and provides 168TB of raw disk storage and 2.8TB of SSD cache in 1U of rack space.
Figure 1: Qumulo’s new all-flash and hybrid storage platforms
Predictive caching built into firm’s file system accelerates all of the company’s hardware platforms by moving data to the fastest media possible when being accessed for reads (see figure 2). This unlocks the advantage of lower cost per-gigabyte storage for retention with limited performance impact.
Figure 2: Aggregate Read Latency
Across Qumulo Global Install Base
Visibility and security enhancements
- Visibility: Enhanced Real-time Analytics for Capacity Utilization
Qumulo’s real-time analytics now illustrate how much capacity is being consumed by storage, snapshots, and metadata. The analytics also provide insights into capacity usage spikes, which can help administrators optimize their capacity utilization, and better understand when it is necessary to plan to buy more storage.
“Storage is a critical asset for rapidly-growing post-production companies like ours. Qumulo alone was able to provide us with real-time analytics about our data and how it’s being used. Other solutions were short-sighted and didn’t provide the insight needed to help us grow our business,” said Conner Stirling, REDLAB’s VFX production coordinator.
“It’s hard to get ahead of the curve as technology changes, but Qumulo can simply do what none of the other storage players can. Qumulo promised to store my data and let me see the unseen, and in my experience that really sums up the impact it’s having on our storage,” said Ron Knol, senior technology consultant, Telus Studios.
- Security: System Activity Audit
Users can now gain insight around access and activities such as data access (‘who wrote this file?’), disappearing files (‘who deleted my file?’), access denial (‘who changed the permissions on my file?’, and configuration changes (‘who deleted my share?’).
Audit feature helps users meet industry and governmental regulations requirements. With the intro of Audit with the recent introduction of Cross-Protocol Permissions, the firm is addressing the demands of organizations with security at the forefront of their concerns.
The C-168T is available June 25, the K-168T is available July 9, and the P-184T is available on July 23. The new software features and functionality are all available in version 2.12.4 of Qumulo’s software which is available now.
Resources:
• Announcement video briefing with senior product manager Jason Sturgeon: Qumulo’s Storage Platform Strategy
• Performance architecture deep dive video of Principal Data Scientist, Tommy Unger: Qumulo’s Performance Architecture
• Try Qumulo’s Hybrid Cloud File Storage
Comments
Qumulo long time choices are confirmed by the market and the industry evolution. The team who already built one of the famous NAS in the past has reedited the same development to lead the category.
One of the key differentiator resides in the internal distributed file system to address limitation in scalability by classic approaches. The mission was to build a new file system layer, only seen by and between cluster nodes, and exposed outside with classic industry standard file sharing protocols such NFS and SMB. It means a new block layer, a new file system structure and especially a directory structure plus a dedicated metadata database to facilitate all operations on metadata, snapshots, etc.
It also means that the company, who started with data replication across nodes offered for quite some time now erasure coding with the Intel ISA-L, delivers good performance. Erasure coding being a de-facto standard shouldn't be a time consuming development effort with existing standards and is no more a differentiator as the majority of offerings are good enough.
If you find a NAS solution without erasure coding, try to listen to the vendor arguments, it will be funny, and invite you to not select this one. In other words, small configuration, small capacity and small file sizes work very well with data replication, no doubt, and this technology is well deployed, respected and proven. But again why some vendors continue to offer what is a must-have and a standard for a few years?
With this announcement, the company introduces models with new dense chassis both for all flash and hybrid ones. The Performance model offers 184TB for 2U and the mixed-workloads and archive ones 168TB for 1U without compromise to the quality of service offered.
The recent addition of GCP and soon Azure plus the integration of Minio and the XPP functionality have created a gap with other recent NAS vendors.
Qumulo integrates Analytics by design as the system is natively thought around that aspect. It marks a difference with the toy Dell have acquired without real or specific integration with the Isilon line continuing to promote a wide support of market file servers and NAS.
If you don't think about that analytic service since the beginning of the design of the product the mission to add it later is possible but really hard. So if you need a horizontal superficial statistics service or a deep vertical analytic one to support the enterprise NAS, you pick for your demanding business workloads.
We don't see any other NAS solutions with this quality and comprehensive set of features globally. Of course NetApp is ubiquitous but more more generic and represents an unified storage approach. Pure Storage FlashBlade is interesting but limited but we expect the Compuverde acquisition to feed the future of FlashBlade.
Some small companies try to follow the wave but they're small with several missing features and anecdotic finally. We don't count here players exposing a distributed file system on clients with agents/drivers like WekaIO, Quobyte, DDN, Panasas, Lustre-based systems or IBM Spectrum Scale usually more dedicated for technical workloads and use cases.
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