Based on the ESG Research Survey conducted in partnership with Qumulo, Hybrid Cloud Trends and the Role of Active Unstructured Data in January 2020, 33% of organizations currently have active unstructured data in the cloud.
The question raised by this week’s DataByte is “What’s preventing the other 66% of organizations from moving to the cloud?”. The simple answer is that it has been difficult to manage two different file systems (one on-prem and the other in the cloud) until now.
Qumulo makes it simple to consolidate your unstructured data with a single solution that runs both on-prem and the cloud. Our hybrid file software provides real-time data visibility, scalability, automation, and ease-of-use regardless of location to meet your performance, processing, and data retention requirements.
This topic relates to another DataBytes post published a few weeks ago: “Why are organizations using file storage in the cloud?”. It is anticipated that, given the recent increase in remote work, that cloud strategies will accelerate even more rapidly than expected to enable individuals to access their data, regardless of how large the datasets might be, network security limitations into private data centers, or where the users are located.
There are numerous legacy file system solutions available today that were designed and developed before the cloud was even a concept. There are also a number of cloud-based file systems, however these don’t work well on-prem. The choice used to be if you wanted to manage active file data on-prem and in the cloud, you had to use two distinctly different file systems that didn’t talk to each other. There was no way to easily manage the two systems or move data back and forth between them.
Further, while there are many companies using the cloud today, most are using it for long-term archive – that is, storing data in the cloud with the hopes that they will never have to access it again. With the democratization of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications, having the luxury of large pools of data that are seldom accessed is vanishing.
One of the key drivers that is a forcing function for organizations to move to the cloud is the ability to access cloud services such as AI and ML applications. These organizations are being urgently challenged to derive value from their unstructured (file) data in order to create new products, innovative business models, and connect with their customers. The products that are created with their file data become their competitive advantage. They are looking to data-driven insights to accelerate innovation and to optimize business investments.
These cloud-based serverless offerings allow users to get the benefit of the latest AI and ML capabilities without managing or even spinning up compute clusters. This lets users focus their efforts entirely on outcomes, not infrastructure. Indeed, while cloud services are extraordinarily valuable, they are not easily accessible unless your data already exists within the cloud service you want to leverage. For some, this is not an issue, but for many organizations, the reality is that file data lives only on-prem. Even if you’re not ready to move to the cloud right now, you should future-proof your business by choosing a cloud-compatible option. Using a cloud-native, enterprise file system like Qumulo’s allows users to span these environments, and locate file data where the service resides — even across cloud providers.
Qumulo runs the same file software and services on-prem and in multiple clouds. Spin-up a cloud instance when you’re ready, replicate your content, and you are now running in the cloud! It’s that easy. No reconfiguring applications, no retraining users, no rewriting API integration scripts. We make the transition seamless.
Qumulo also offers a flexible deployment model, so you can create an instance based on the capacity and performance needs of your workloads. You can build any size cluster, from GBs to PBs, with the flexibility to add storage on-demand – whether on-prem or in the cloud – and quickly feed data into AI/ML applications. With Qumulo’s integrated, real-time analytics, you have visibility when you need to grow or reduce the cluster size making sure your needs are always met.
Qumulo enables you to have confidence in your cloud services with enterprise-proven features you need in the cloud: Cross-Protocol Permissions (XPP), snapshots, quotas, replication, and mixed protocol support. Replication creates a secondary copy to protect against data loss across a zone or region. Snapshots give the option to rollback to point-in-time copies.
One of the most important things to consider in any deployment is how to deal with environments that have both Windows, macOS (SMB) and Unix/Linux (NFS) clients accessing the data at once. Having to manually ensure no one overwrites someone else’s data or limiting who can use what based on the type of operating system they have, is less than optimal. Qumulo provides automatic mixed protocol support with XPP, ensuring users can access the data when and where they need it.
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Download the ESG Research Insights Paper to learn more.
