We are excited to announce the launch of Azure Native Qumulo Cold (ANQ Cold), the world’s only cloud-native file offering for storing massive cold data!
ANQ Cold is not just another addition to the cold file storage solutions available in the cloud; it’s a radical shift in providing customers with a cost-effective, simple way to manage cold data. ANQ Cold addresses a critical need in the industry by providing the first truly cloud-native, fully managed SaaS solution for storing and retrieving cold file data. But what exactly makes ANQ Cold stand out in the cloud storage marketplace?
- ANQ Cold includes all data services and feature capabilities as ANQ Hot. This includes ALL enterprise-level features you would expect from an on-premises filesystem, like cryptographically locked snapshots, quotas, SMB/NFS/S3/REST file access, security integrations, and many others. 1000+ customers from around the world trust Qumulo for their most demanding workloads.
- ANQ Cold pricing is ridiculously inexpensive at $9.95 per TB per month – and there are NO filesystem transactional fees associated with ANQ Cold, making the cost of storage EASY to forecast.
- Unlike other cloud-native file solutions today, it is not monolithically bound to a small volume. Customers can grow to exabyte scale, paying only for what they use.
- ANQ Cold has fantastic retrieval performance. You get years of innovation, HPC-ready performance, and SSD-based VMs on each ANQ Cold storage instance. While each instance includes up to 2GBps, we can elastically go up (and back down) from there (for a fee). This means you can easily unlock and leverage your cold data using all available cloud-native Azure AI services.
- Customers get 5 TB of read operations per month at NO CHARGE.
- Should you need a fully capable DR platform in the cloud, ANQ Cold can go from cold to hot in an instant, making disaster recovery scenarios fast AND inexpensive.
Let’s look deeper at the advantages of ANQ Cold…
No Application Refactoring
ANQ Cold eliminates the need for complex application workflow refactoring. This is a significant advantage for organizations that rely on legacy systems dependent on file. For example, before ANQ Cold, if a customer wanted to store petabytes of data in a tape archive or cold blob in the cloud, and provide application compatibility to that data, they would need a file gateway connected to gain access. Doing this means that 1) the file gateway becomes a choke point for application performance, and 2) all transactions flowing through that gateway become both expensive and difficult to forecast. After all, you’re paying for both object storage AND file gateway costs just to retain application filesystem compatibility! This cost pinches budget owners, especially when a massive amount of data retrieval is urgently needed. With ANQ Cold, customers can go from cold to hot in an instant without an expensive and unwieldy translation layer gateway between file and object.
A Perfect Fit for Healthcare
Hospitals that are transforming and hybridizing their PACS infrastructure are a perfect fit for ANQ Cold, a HIPAA compliant cloud-native storage solution. For the vendor neutral archive (VNA), specifically, hospitals have a choice to tier all cold DICOM images to a cloud-native solution. ANQ Cold offers low cost, instant access for image retrieval, performing with the same characteristics as their current primary PACS solution.
One of the most compelling features of ANQ Cold is its generous data retrieval allowance. Unlike traditional cloud-based cold storage solutions that impose steep charges for data retrieval, ANQ Cold includes up to 5TB of data retrieval per month at no additional cost. This enhances the economic viability of rapid restore with peace of mind knowing that their data is readily accessible when they need it. Case in point:
At an average of 25MB per DICOM image, hospitals can retrieve 200,000 images from their PACS vendor neutral archive.
Depending on how many patients a given hospital processes each month, many organizations could even use ANQ Cold for their primary PACS storage!
Cryptographically Locked 2nd Copy, Instantly Retrievable
All companies worry about the day when they must pay a ransom to a bad actor who successfully infiltrated their defenses. CIOs and CISOs are always looking for better, more cost-effective ways of securing their data in preparation for such an event. Cyber professionals never want to be the one responsible for contributing to the $1.1 BILLION in ransom that went to cyber criminals in 2023.
ANQ Cold serves as a robust, inexpensive, and secure defense against ransomware attacks. By leveraging Azure’s advanced security features and offering affordable data-at-rest rates, ANQ Cold enables customers to create secure second copies of their data in the cloud, safeguarding against data loss and ensuring business continuity in the face of cyber threats. This not only mitigates the risk of costly ransom payments, but also helps keep ransomware insurance premiums low. ANQ Cold + cryptographically locked snapshots make it a win-win for businesses looking to move to hybrid cloud while simultaneously fortifying their cybersecurity defenses.
Cost to store a second copy
This is simple to calculate, as typically the replication target growth is based on the snapshot delta change rate. Let’s look at a monthly change rate based on 1PB of a total footprint, with the following considerations:
- Based on a monthly change rate of 10% on 1000TB
- Assumes no continuous growth
- Changes consist of file modifications and deletes between snapshots
- Snapshots retained for 4 months with ANQ Cold (min length to retain data before deleting)
- Snapshots occur every 8 hours
- Average retained snapshot capacity is calculated by 1400 (based on 100TB per month of snapshots)
1400 TB of average capacity at $9.95 = $13,930.00 / month. (From our pricing calculator.)
Cost to retrieve data
Customers that require a hot standby can use the ANQ Cold as a DR target and pay only for the number of reads beyond 5TB. We assume only about 10% of that data is active in a DR scenario, so only 100TB would be read, but the remaining 900TB would be available if needed. At $0.03 per GB beyond 5TB, it would cost only $2,850 to READ the 100TB of data in a DR target that provides infrastructure that instantly flips from COLD → HOT.
Industry-leading, Differentiated, Secure, Cloud-Native Architecture
Let’s not forget ANQ’s advantages in its cloud-native architecture.
Just like ANQ Hot, ANQ Cold uses storage-optimized Azure VMs to unlock the power of Qumulo’s enterprise-ready filesystem. Because Qumulo’s cloud-native architecture disaggregates the blob storage from the filesystem, ANQ can scale each layer independently. True to being a software-defined storage architecture, abstracting the filesystem from its underlying storage allows ANQ to scale with performance demands seamlessly, transparently, and on the fly. This disaggregation results in lower costs for the customer, increased performance when it’s needed, and impressive eleven nines of reliability and durability. These breakthrough innovations are the reason Qumulo has been recognized as a leader in Gartner’s Distributed File and Object Storage Magic Quadrant for six years in a row.
ANQ – Lowest Pricing, By a Longshot
In terms of pricing, ANQ Cold adopts a transparent and flexible pay-as-you-go model, ensuring that customers only pay for the capacity they consume. Unlike many file storage solutions on the market today, ANQ Cold is EASY to forecast, as it does not charge for filesystem or API transactional fees. With a competitive price per TB per month and generous data retrieval allowances, ANQ Cold offers exceptional value, making it effectively the ONLY cloud-native file storage service on the market today.
Something often overlooked by prospects is that all Qumulo customers enjoy the value of zero-latency support from Qumulo’s world-class customer success team. Anytime you have a question or an issue that needs to be resolved, simply ask through your Slack channel.
Try it Yourself
To wrap up, Qumulo’s Azure Native Qumulo Cold (ANQ Cold) represents a paradigm shift in the world of file storage. By combining cost-effectiveness, simplicity, scalability, security, and reliability, ANQ Cold empowers organizations to unlock the full potential of their cold file data while simultaneously enhancing data protection, accessibility, and resilience. As businesses continue to grapple with the challenges of managing ever-expanding volumes of cold data, ANQ Cold is a SINGULAR offering, standing out as the best and only cloud file storage service on the market today.
Start your free trial today.
For more information about ANQ Cold and its pricing, please visit here.
