Qumulo and Supermicro Deliver New Cost-Efficient Hybrid Storage Solution

November 1, 2022

Authored by:

Qumulo Team

Discover how customers can get the performance they need at an even greater value

Keeping storage costs under control is a constant challenge for storage professionals. Admins must ensure the maximum availability and performance of their data, without letting costs run out of control. Considering how quickly and often capacity and performance needs can change over time, and the fact that budgets are often tight, it’s no wonder storage cost is often reported to be a top pain point for storage professionals.

Historically, customers looking to leverage Qumulo on Supermicro systems only had all-NVMe nodes to choose from. While still relatively cost-efficient for performance, it can still be difficult to justify the expense for less performance-intensive workloads. Supermicro customers no longer have to choose between speed or cost. New Hybrid-NVMe nodes from Qumulo and Supermicro strike an ideal balance between performance and capacity in a single, simple solution.

More Options for Cost-Conscious Customers

Having to deploy and manage multiple storage vendors to achieve the optimal balance of performance and cost adds procurement and operational complexity, and limits how much customers can leverage a preferred vendor. For customers looking to maximize the value of their Supermicro deployment, the new Hybrid-NVMe platform provides a more cost-efficient option to complement our existing All-NVMe platform.

How Hybrid-NVMe Achieves High Performance at Lower Cost

The new Hybrid-NVMe platform is driven by Qumulo’s unique underlying architecture and intelligent caching capability. All data on Qumulo is written initially to SSD storage, delivering flash-level performance for all writes. On hybrid nodes, as the data ages, Qumulo’s AI-driven algorithm monitors how often the data is re-accessed, eventually moving it automatically to the HDD layer as it “cools”.

If access requests for HDD-based data rise above a certain threshold, the AI algorithm moves it back to SSD storage, while less-active data remains on the disk layer. In fact, most reads on a Qumulo cluster are from the SSD layer as a result – all recently written data, and nearly all recently-accessed data. Additionally, as Qumulo monitors how your data is being used, it anticipates what you’re going to read next and automatically prefetches this data to SSD, resulting in sub-millisecond latency for the majority of reads, even as less active data remains on economical HDDs.

This means up to 80% of reads and 100% of writes are flash-first, resulting in up to 60% faster reads and 200%* faster writes than an all-HDD platform, and up to 80% of the speed of all-flash — at a price point much closer to all-disk.

How This Benefits Supermicro Customers Using Qumulo

More focus on overall value

As companies become more cost-conscious, storage budgets may get trimmed, while expectations on performance remain the same or even increase. We now make it possible for customers who want to leverage Supermicro for cost-effective storage with near-NVMe performance.

More ways to leverage Supermicro

IT professionals need the optionality to build solutions that fit the unique needs of their business. Supermicro customers now have more choices to leverage the simplicity of Qumulo, while still meeting their performance and price objectives, without having to rely on multiple platform vendors to achieve both.

Analyzing and visualizing your data with Qumulo also makes it easy for you to get real-time data visibility and awareness, so you always know where your data is, who’s using it, and how much is being used. This increases your ability to create an efficient plan for capacity (on top of what we’re introducing for Supermicro customers).

Not only that, but we’ve also built security into the system to provide optimized data protection at no extra cost. You don’t have to worry about the administration or overhead of outside security vendors.

And, our API-first management software allows you to create, manage, and tear down data services. And, you have the power to programmatically retrieve all information with REST calls.