We have always done our best to be customer focused at Qumulo. Our customer success team goes above and beyond to make sure our customers are just that, wildly successful. We placed customers at the center of our magnetic field even before we had any. Before we wrote a line of code, we talked to over 600 storage users and used their input to drive our product roadmap. (Our approach worked and our customers are feeling the love.) So, when the Taneja Group interviewed 350 IT professionals about their plans for cloud storage, we were all ears.
Find out more of the Taneja Group’s findings by downloading their Qumulo opinion piece
It is no secret that cloud storage is becoming ever more important to the enterprise. In fact, according to the Taneja Group, cloud spending is growing at a double-digit rate. What is surprising though, is how quickly the paradigm has shifted towards the cloud. A quarter of those interviewed believe that nearly half of their primary data will be in the cloud within the next two years.
What is driving companies to cloud storage?
The shift from on-premise to cloud makes sense. There are many reasons that organizations want to take advantage of the elastic compute resources and geographic reach that the public cloud offers. However, although much of the data that companies generate is file-based, the existing cloud storage solutions for these workloads still pose challenges. Customers are still reluctant to move their file data to the cloud because the available options can’t scale performance and they neglect important features such as SMB and NFS protocol support.
The recent release of Qumulo addresses these issues. Our goal at Qumulo is to give our customers the freedom to store and manage their data where they want. Take one of our media customers as an example. They had a large render job, a quickly approaching deadline, and a desperate need for more resources if they were to get the job done. Because Qumulo spans both the public cloud and on-premise solutions, they were able to transfer the data to a Qumulo cluster in the cloud, use the computational horsepower of the cloud for the render job, then transfer the results back to their data center. More importantly, they were able to produce a great final product on schedule.
File data drives cloud storage adoption
It isn’t only media companies that are looking for reliable file options in the cloud. File-based data is the engine of innovation that drives many businesses, no matter what their focus. Going back to the Taneja Group’s research, nearly half of respondents said the applications they would like to move to the cloud are file based.
As we can see, there is a real need for true file-based storage in the cloud. Object storage, which until recently has been the primary cloud offering, fails to provide the high performance and enterprise features many of today’s workloads require. A common workaround is to add a file gateway accelerator in front of an object-based system. This only leads to more complexity, because there is no single system that allows files to be stored where they are needed.
Adoption of new technologies never happens overnight, and a shift as big as using the public cloud for primary storage requires strategic planning. For those organizations who need the features of a universal-scale file storage system but are not quite ready to go all-in with the cloud, QF2 can run in the data center on commodity or HPE hardware. Then, when these companies want, they can run a QF2 cluster in the cloud and take advantage of the dynamic provisioning that the cloud offers, to achieve the same scalability and control as they have on premise.
