Freedom of Choice and Fewer Barriers: Qumulo’s Data Platform Covers New Grounds

Something very interesting is happening in IT right now. We have come to the threshold of a new world, the key to which is data. Data equals competitive advantage and corporate success; it is what guides decisions, boosts sales and lowers cost.

Yet underneath that, data has triggered a familiar struggle. In business houses, execs are grappling to make the choice between cloud and on-prem for their data.

Data is getting generated at mind-boggling speeds. Nanalyze reports that 90% of all the unstructured data that we have today is produced within the last few years. And more data will be created in the next three years than in the entirety of recorded history.

This is spurring new trends and use cases, fueling enterprises’ ambitions to harvest and utilize data. Futurum Intelligence predicts data management market to grow at 4.85% CAGR between 2023 and 2028.

“Data is increasingly finding ways to be valuable,” noted Douglas Gourlay, CEO of Qumulo, a data storage company based out of Seattle. “Data feeds image recognition systems in medical imaging and PACS systems. We have proteomics microscopes that generate 750 terabytes of new data a week. Universities want to keep video surveillance data for the duration of the statute of limitations for the types of crimes that often occur in campus environments….or jail systems.”

But as CTOs debate continuing to migrate to CSPs or remaining on-prem, Gourlay believes that they should have the freedom of choice.

“All of us operate within the hybrid world,” he said. “There are workloads that make tremendous sense in the cloud, and there are workloads that make tremendous sense on-prem. The choice is a function of where your applications are, where your data is, where it’s generated, where your facilities are, the quality, caliber and breadth of the team you have, your facilities’ capabilities, and so on.”

A seven-time leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant, Qumulo is working to make data consistently available, no matter the choice of platform. In the process, Qumulo hopes to “flatten the unit economics” between public and private data centers, and “eliminate as many technology barriers as possible,” said Gourlay.

“Historically cloud was a difficult business decision for file because the price was $150.00 per TB per month, versus $4 to $8 on-prem,” he noted, explaining the reason for the myopia in the industry.

Offsetting the difference allows enterprises to practically determine, without sticker shock, where to put their workloads and data.

Qumulo started its journey in 2012 as a simple, easy-to-use, scale-out file system. It spent the better part of the decade tuning its features and building new capabilities to support the operational requirements of the biggest enterprises, and become the primary storage system for enterprise unstructured data, Gourlay told.

Today, Qumulo is a software-defined, distributed file system that runs anywhere –cloud to on-prem, at the edge and in hybrid multi-cloud.

It has a cloud-native architecture built on disaggregation that provides a fully elastic file storage system. Capacity and throughout can be scaled elastically and independently. And designed to scale, it can expand to support exabytes of data, millions of operations and thousands of users, says the company.

Additionally, it includes file services that are platform-agnostic and available across core data centers, cloud and hybrid multi-cloud platforms. Through abstraction of physical and virtual resources of the platform, Qumulo leverages cloud services to deliver customers a better infrastructure.

“Holding the data, curating it, making it available and then getting it where it needs to be to do the thing is most valuable for the business,” Gourlay said while promoting a newly launched feature at past week’s Cloud Field Day event in California.

In November 2023, Qumulo announced a software solution called the Global Namespace that added a powerful feature to the Qumulo platform. Global Namespace is designed to offer fast access to files in any location consistently across regions, data centers and edge locations.

“Building a global namespace that’s strictly consistent allows ensuring that the doctor gets the latest PACS images when they’re looking at a client…or enabling national intelligence community collection worldwide or streaming out data in the engineering world,” he said.

Qumulo’s self-optimization capabilities maintain maximum performance by identifying and proactively moving frequently accessed data blocks to the right tiers, ensuring fast access.

Gourlay highlighted that the feature “dramatically improves the performance in any AI type application where you have to rapidly serve the data and there’s an iteration of that data again and again fed through the pipeline.”

Qumulo’s embedded cache manager has over ~95% cache hit rate, the company says, that “massively compresses down the costs in the cloud”.

Qumulo also integrates natively with retrieval augmented generation (RAG) AI systems. As of now, it can integrate with Copilot, OpenAI and Graph connectors allowing access and analysis of unstructured data and delivery of insights.

Qumulo lets users decide what hardware to use. The solution is compatible with standard x86, ARM, Cisco, Dell, HPE, Supermicro – the whole gamut. And as opposed to the standard 9-month time window that solutions typically take to get qualified, Gourlay told that Qumulo takes only 30 days.

For more, be sure to check out the demo from Qumulo’s appearance at the Cloud Field Day event on Techfieldday.com