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Flash storage startup Qumulo is sure checking all the hot boxes with its new Core 2.0 file system release. These features include solid-state (check), data-aware (check), scale-out (check), commodity hardware (check) and data analytics (check).
Qumulo, which has iterated 24 new updates of its software since it exited stealth in March 2015, came out April 12 with the major upgrade, and then threw in three new hybrid storage appliances for good measure.
Qumulo makes what it boldly calls “the world’s first data-aware, scale-out” network-attached enterprise storage system—one that has data analytics built right into it.
The Seattle-based company, whose name is Latin for “stack,” spent three full years in product development. It was founded by industry veterans from Isilon (now property of EMC), Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft. The first product, Qumulo Core, was designed by the inventors of scale-out NAS to store and manage billions—even trillions—of files.
Building a List of Customers
After only one year, Qumulo has about 50 paying enterprise customers and deploys more than 40PB of capacity. Deployments start as small about 100TB and run up to footprints as large as 4PB, Vice President of Product Management Jeff Cobb told eWEEK.
“One of the more important features of this new version is erasure coding,” Cobb said. “It gives us several benefits, including letting us scale more, more efficient use of the underlying hardware resources and more resiliency against the inevitable failure of hardware.”
Erasure coding is a method of data protection in which data is broken into fragments, expanded and encoded with redundant data pieces and stored across a set of different locations or storage media.
Qumulo Core 2.0 has real-time data analytics built directly into the file system, giving enterprises a complete view of their data and storage resources at scale. Cobb said that with greater visibility into which data is most valuable, where it is stored, which users or applications are accessing what files, and what should be archived, backed up or deleted, Qumulo customers report significant gains in workflow performance and storage efficiency.
What’s New in Core 2.0 Release
New features in Qumulo Core 2.0, according to Cobb, include the following:
—Scalable: This enables the use of the highest-capacity drives on the market today (10TB, 8TB, 6TB HGST Helium drives) with less than 1-hour rebuild times for uninterrupted operations at scale;
—Efficient: Up to 33 percent increase in usable storage capacity including the ability to efficiently handle tens of billions of small and large files;
—Resilient: Withstands up to two concurrent drive failures or one storage node failure without any data loss;
—Provides intelligently aggregated insights for storage data management and capacity planning, such as giving immediate answers to how storage capacity usage has changed in the past 72 hours, 30 days and 52 weeks. Users can drill down to understand which files have been added and deleted by path.
“Users can now answer questions of ‘Where did all of my storage capacity go?’ and ‘When will I run out of storage space, and why?'” Cobb said.
With its new QC40 and QC260 hybrid appliances, Qumulo will be the first storage system manufacturer to ship the new Ultrastar He10; at 10TB, these are the highest-density helium-filled hard disk drives HGST makes. Qumulo also introduced the QC104, a new mid-capacity hybrid appliance.
Qumulo QC-Series hybrid storage appliances now number five models, with starting capacities spanning from 96TB to more than 1PB of raw storage.
Qumulo Core is currently in production in commercial high-performance computing (HPC) and large-scale unstructured data environments, with customers that include the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, MSG Networks, Sinclair Oil, Sportvision, UConn Health, University of Utah Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, and others.
Availability and Pricing
Qumulo Core 2.0 software is available now. The new QC40, QC104 and QC260 appliances will become available in Q2. Pricing for an entry four-node QC24 cluster running Qumulo Core 2.0 starts at $50,000.