The growth of object storage and other cloud native technologies has seen a shift in application architectures, but file services are still very important in the enterprise. Many cases exist in which data is being created rapidly and file services are best suited to address the problem at hand. Existing applications that are unlikely to be refactored in the near term, or the simple need to write data to a shared file system so that it can be read and modified from multiple endpoints mean that tried and true file services are still going to be heavily utilized.
Despite the popularity and ubiquity of file services, it is an area that has not seen much innovation in recent years. Perhaps there is an attitude that “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”, but in an age when IT is tasked with building new solutions to business problems and driving digital transformation, innovation is in high demand. Simply creating a new NFS export or SMB share and dumping it on your application developers doesn’t do much to help solve business challenges.
Qumulo’s Take on Scale-out File Storage
In a recent discussion with Qumulo CEO Bill Richter, I had the opportunity to hear how the company is bringing new features and functionality that meet the needs and expectations of modern customers. The company’s scale out filesystem has been providing enterprise class file services for mission critical workloads for years now, both on-premises or in AWS. Their main focus is on supplying a filesystem with the kind of security, performance, and resiliency that enterprise customers desire.
Recently Qumulo announced that they are also partnering with GCP to provide their filesystem on the platform and provide customers with additional choice when it comes to where they run their applications and data. Additional announcements show how Qumulo is intent on helping customers create a hybrid cloud architecture for their applications and data.
The recently announced Qumulo CloudContinuity product allows customers to replicate their data to the public cloud to enable both disaster recovery (DR), test/dev, and migration use cases. By making the data available in the cloud Richter feels customers no longer have to lift and shift. Instead they are “already shifted” and ready to take advantage of the cloud with their already available data.
Use Cases for All Verticals
Known well in the media and entertainment industry, Qumulo’s recently announced CloudStudio is meant to allow teams to collaborate globally on content creation projects by sharing video and other media assets around the world. By partnering with other companies within the media creation space, Qumulo’s file storage is part of an integrated solution for media and entertainment (M&E) companies.
Despite offering a product that is popular in the M&E space, Qumulo is quick to remind customers that their product has many use cases despite the vertical market it is being deployed in. Oil and gas, life sciences, and corporate video are all uses cases the company highlights. File services in general have many use cases with stateless, micro-services based application architectures becoming increasingly popular. Persistent storage in some form is needed for these applications and file services have been very popular for such applications.
Ken’s Conclusion
We have seen file services undergo a renaissance in recent years as folks see the need for shared, persistent storage. Many of the established names have been announcing new features and functionality in attempt to differentiate themselves from others in a market that is growing. Qumulo is attempting to set themselves apart by offering specific functionality to M&E companies yet still provide an enterprise filesystem that can be useful regardless of the customer’s vertical market. Qumulo has proven in recent years that they are a compelling product and worth considering within the scale-out software defined storage market.
