Qumulo comes of age

Qumulo is crossing the chasm: they have 50 paying customers with over 40PB in production. Real production, not POCs.

That includes clusters from 4 nodes to more than 20 nodes with over 4PB at a large telco. They practice agile development with 24 software releases in the last year. Roughly a drop every two weeks.

Their model is 100% software delivered on commodity hardware and Linux, delivered 100% through the channel. Their key product is QSFS, the Qumulo storage file system.

What they do

• Data-aware scale-out file & object storage software
• Real-time analytics built into the file system for visibility into data footprint, usage, performance

Their key markets: commercial HPC, large scale unstructured data, and machine data. What’s missing? Oil and gas, but that’s due to the global collapse of oil prices, not their product.

So what’s new?
They’re announcing QSFS v2.0 or Qumulo Core 2. New features include

• Reed-Solomon erasure coding. They’ve mirrored until now, so this will use current capacity more efficiently.
• Capacity trending. Ever come in Monday morning and there’s no free capacity? Qumulo can tell you why.
• New parallel rebuild of less protected data in a few minutes. A data rebuild, not a drive rebuild.
• New appliance line with up to 260 TB of raw capacity per 4U node.

The StorageMojo take
While Qumulo and Data Gravity have a similar focus on data analytics, they address different markets. Qumulo’s scale out architecture favors large scale deployments while Data Gravity is an SMB appliance play. Room enough for both.

Isilon is Qumulo’s real competition. Qumulo’s modern architecture and data analytics gives them a significant lead over Isilon.

NetApp should buy Qumulo and keep it a separate product line – no “dis-integration” into OnTap – to fight Isilon and to provide a viable alternative to customers whose workloads aren’t amenable to cloud hosting. NetApp’s sales force could accelerate Qumulo’s growth, if the company can overcome their NIH mindset.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.