We recently launched three new configurations that take advantage of the highest capacity SSDs and HDDs on the market. For Qumulo’s customers, this means more storage capacity for your budget. And with Qumulo’s intelligent and predictive Flash cache, more performance for your budget as well.
What was announced and why it matters
Qumulo offers three different platforms:
P-Series (All-Flash File): Qumulo introduced the new P-184T, leveraging 7.68TB NVMe Flash drives. This, combined with the recent significant drop in NVMe prices, translates to our ability to offer all-NVMe file storage at the same price we were offering HDD-based solutions three years ago!
This means organizations looking to move to a modern architecture in their datacenter (such as 100GbE network, no-spinning disk, and less need to replace drives due to lower Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)), have an option that won’t break the bank. Customers are turning to Qumulo’s NVMe-based platforms not just for high-performance workloads, but also for general file storage and SAN replacements.
C-Series (Performant Flash-first File): We also enhanced our dense 1U platform, which provides a compelling active archive solution to handle high-performance workloads while still providing massive improvements in economics, density, and power efficiencies.
As we analyzed the system, we determined that this system on a chip (SoC) provided just the right amount of resources to enable Qumulo software to run high-performance workloads in addition to active archive workloads. We started this transition with the C-72T, providing 72TB of storage for customers with lower capacity needs, as well as those with workloads needing more performance than capacity. We added 14TB HDDs to this configuration, providing an amazing 168TB of capacity in 1U of rackspace for high-capacity and high-performance workloads. This translates to a much lower cost to our customers, without requiring a special rack (<1m deep).
K-Series (Active Archive File): Last year we launched the K-144T and it has been a resounding success enabling our customers to deploy large capacities with great economics, without compromising on features. We upgraded this system from 144TB to 168TB using 14TB HDDs, making the solution even more economical.
By going to a larger drive, we not only increased the density of the platform (which helps lower customers’ purchasing costs), it also lowers overall data center costs. As many customers are incorporating the cloud into their IT strategy, their physical data center space is not expanding, making density even more critical to a successful storage deployment.
How did we do it?
There are two key reasons that Qumulo is able to bring technical innovations like these to market so quickly, which continually make our solutions more cost-effective:
Linux is our underlying operating system. By developing our software as a user-space application that runs on Linux, we have incredible flexibility to run anywhere that Linux does. The traditional NAS vendors are based on FreeBSD, which does not innovate or support newer hardware anywhere near the rate that Linux provides us.
We designed and developed our distributed storage software from the ground up. When Qumulo started, we identified the key requirements necessary to build a rock-solid, highly performant, scalable storage solution that allows for rapid innovation. A critical component that allows us to adopt the largest drives quickly is the distributed scalable block storage layer. This block storage layer enables efficient erasure-coding across the nodes, allowing us to massively scale and re-protect drives quickly in the event of a drive failure. Although Qumulo runs in user-space, we write directly to the media to get the maximum performance possible. This is unlike many other file systems that write to partitions or, worse, to files on top of another file system on the drives.
How can we keep doing it?
We continually strive to build the best team and processes to bring optimized, tailored platforms to market that will optimally run Qumulo software. We are constantly evaluating technology options on the market from chassis, CPU, network, and disk manufacturers. We like to say we “shop the planet” to find the right configurations for maximum performance and value for our customers, so they don’t have to. This is the core mission for our on-prem business.
To learn more about how our software stack works, check out this blog post series from Steven Haber (“Qumulo’s core architecture is built with hardware flexibility in mind”), and our architecture overview video (“Qumulo’s File System Architecture”).
To learn about our new offerings, check out our product pages or reach out for a demonstration.
