Qumulo’s Distributed File System

Your choice of operating environments

Qumulo software runs in the public cloud and on industry-standard hardware in your data center.

In your data center, Qumulo software runs on Qumulo’s own standards-based hardware platforms — the all-NVMe P-Series for high performance, the C-Series for a balance of performance and capacity, and the K-Series for active archive.

Because Qumulo’s file system is software-defined, there are no dependencies on expensive proprietary hardware components such as custom NVRAM and proprietary flash storage, or InfiniBand switches. Instead, Qumulo’s file system runs on industry-standard hard disk drives (HDD), solid state drives (SSD), and NVMe storage using standard device firmware.

In fact, it is this software-defined approach that allows Qumulo software to run on partner hardware and in the cloud. Qumulo software runs on Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) Apollo Gen10 servers, Fujitsu, and in the cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

You can expect Qumulo software to run in more places and on more platforms as we continue to add support for servers from other manufacturers and other public clouds.

Unlike other cloud-based file storage systems, a Qumulo instance running in the public cloud has no hard limits for performance or capacity. Both can be increased by adding instances. Qumulo is the only solution for cloud that lets you flexibly scale both capacity and performance.

When running in the cloud, Qumulo’s file system uses cloud block storage in a way that’s similar to the SSD/ HDD combination on premise. Qumulo uses low-latency block storage as a cache in front of economical higher-latency block storage.

Qumulo software runs in Linux user space rather than kernel space. Kernel mode is primarily for device drivers that work with specific hardware. By operating in user space, Qumulo can run in a wide variety of configurations and environments, and also deliver features at a much faster pace.

Running in user space also means Qumulo’s file system can have its own implementations of crucial protocols such as SMB, NFS, LDAP and Active Directory. For example, Qumulo’s implementation of NFS runs as a system service and has its own notions of users and groups separate from the underlying operating system on which it runs.

Running in user space also improves Qumulo’s reliability. As an independent user-space process, Qumulo is isolated from other system components that could introduce memory corruption, and the Qumulo development processes can make use of advanced memory verification tools that allow memory-related coding errors to be detected prior to software release.