Define an ideal data platform. For Qumulo, its ideal platform is the consolidation of data into a single application. Qumulo aims to bring all of a company’s data off multiple environments, multiple end-user machines, scale-ops machines out of capacity, etc. into one scalable software application.
Scalability
Scalability refers to many things in the data world. It can be the number of files, performance, or capacity, and Qumulo is designed to meet all of those different takes on scalability, including scaling into the cloud and adjusting to a company’s different and ever-moving goalposts.
Cloud has become even more popular since COVID hit, and entire companies are forced to work from home. Many organizations now need to extend their cloud, get more storage, and provision more things in their public or hybrid cloud environments.
If a company has scripted and integrated applications with Qumulo in the datacenter and want to move into the cloud, it can spin up a Qumulo instance in the cloud using the same Qumolo software, now running in the cloud. All of the integration, whether it is business management processes, chargebacks, or data creation applications, will automatically work with cloud infrastructure because it’s using the same API and the same software—it’s not even a different software build.
With Qumulo, if a company needs to extend its cloud for any reason, including application testing, enabling remote workers, or launching video production in the cloud, it can easily do this using the same Qumulo tools and the same Qumulo application, making that digital transformation objective seamless.
No matter how a company is connecting to Qumulo, all data is written to SSDs first because it gives excellent performance.
At Cloud Field Day 8, Molly Presley, Head of Global Product Marketing, took a deep dive into Qumulo product architecture.
Qumulo Shift
Using Qumulo’s Shift for AWS A3, customers can copy data from any Qumulo cluster—whether on-prem or already running in a choice of clouds—to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service cloud object store (AWS S3). This allows the customer to take advantage of the over 2,500 AWS cloud services and applications.
Shift is designed to allow the user to specify a set of data and make a copy in S3 to process it or run applications and services against it. Shift keeps the native object format, and there’s no file system to come back through to use that data.
A use-case for Shift is the oil and gas industry. For example, seismic results data from a ship is processed in a very high-performance Qumulo cluster. The company can make a Shift and S3 copy so that when it sells that data to another oil and gas company, it can access it. S3 is a great place to put the data for long-term sharing.
Making a Choice
Qumolos’s ability to offer several things; data management across on-prem and across multiple clouds, enterprise security features that allow a company to know who has access to the data, data protection, backup, and having all-flash arrays, are all important considerations when choosing a data platform.
Currently, Qumulo’s software is available through both HPE and Fujitsu as their scale-out solution, meaning that a client will not be hardware-bound when choosing Qumulo. With the rapidity of the cloud evolution, no one wants to be stuck with hardware from yesteryear due to ever-present vendor lock-in.
Qumulo is about flexibility and having the right storage platform, whether it’s a cheap app active archive, high performance, all-flash, or running in a cloud-native environment.
Our Thoughts
The question is, why is Qumulo a healthy option in a list of contenders? A few reasons include that Qumolo makes the cloud journey more accessible, gives the client real-time visibility into data through analytics, offers all NBME storage nodes in the datacenter, and is API-driven.
In addition, the entire Qumulo file system falls under one license. There are no subscriber add-ons. Qumulo has a subscription, which includes everything they do. This seems like a simple and easy system.
To learn more about Qumulo and its data solutions, catch them on their website https://qumulo.com/.
