Executive Snapshot: Qumulo’s FY22 Results Indicate Accelerating Sales Traction

In February 2022, Qumulo released its FY22 financials, exhibiting significant positive momentum and traction. With the increased focus on managed unstructured data storage brought on by digital transformation, Qumulo is well-positioned to serve enterprise customers’ needs with a solution that is software-defined, cloud-native, and very easy to deploy and manage at scale. This IDC Market Note provides commentary around Qumulo’s recent performance and how the vendor’s evolving capabilities are targeting key unstructured data storage management trends in the industry today.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• The scale-out file storage market is poised for strong growth. IDC’s latest file storage forecast shows that scale-out file storage will grow from $8.0 billion in 2021 to $11.4 billion by 2025, exhibiting an 11.4% five-year compound annual growth rate. Most of this growth will be driven by enterprise rather than technical computing spending.
• Qumulo offers a second-generation distributed scale-out file system that is already widely deployed in the enterprise. Many of the vendor’s employees have come from first-generation distributed scale-out file system vendors and the company has engineered a number of features that specifically address perennial challenges of first-generation distributed scale-out architectures, particularly around the flexibility of deployment and ease of management at scale.
• As data management has become more important in addressing continued high data growth as enterprises move through digital transformation, it is notable that Qumulo recognized this trend early and built native features into its product that provide the necessary visibility. Qumulo Aware is a module in the vendor’s Qumulo Core distributed scale-out file system platform that provides excellent visibility in hybrid multicloud environments that make it easier to determine where data should be placed, deployment-wise (and when it can safely be deleted) to meet individual enterprise requirements for access, cost, and compliance. Features built into Qumulo Core provide options to move large (and small) data sets very efficiently in terms of compute, storage, and network utilization.

IN THIS MARKET NOTE

In February 2022, Qumulo released its FY22 financials, exhibiting significant positive momentum and traction. With the increased focus on managing unstructured data storage brought on by digital transformation, Qumulo is well positioned to serve enterprise customer needs with a solution that is software defined, cloud native, and very easy to deploy and manage at scale. This IDC Market Note provides commentary around Qumulo’s recent performance and how the vendor’s evolving capabilities are targeting key unstructured data storage management trends in the industry today.

IDC’S POINT OF VIEW

The scale-out file system market is going through significant change right now. Long the province of vendors like NetApp (with its clustered scale-up file system offering) and Dell Isilon/PowerScale (with its distributed scale-out file system offering), new workloads being deployed by digitally transforming enterprises have storage administrators looking for improved efficiency in how they capture, store, protect, analyze, and manage unstructured data. These two vendors have been increasingly challenged in the past several years by newer scale-out file system designs that claim to offer faster, more efficient operations, more flexibility, and easier management at scale. Qumulo is one of those “second generation” distributed scale-out file system vendors that has been competing very successfully in this space.

Qumulo released financials for its fiscal year 2022 (which ended January 31, 2022) that demonstrate significant market traction. Founded in 2012 and shipping for revenue since April 2015, the vendor’s product exhibits notable ease of use and scalability advantages over legacy scale-out file systems that have driven good growth. A privately held vendor, Qumulo became a unicorn when it hit a $1.2 billion valuation in July 2020. Qumulo’s 4Q22 results represented the vendor’s best quarter ever, and its fourth quarter results demonstrated 75% sequential growth over its third quarter results. During its FY22, the vendor added over 200 new customers. Qumulo sells its products on a subscription basis.

Consistent with its claim of scalability as a differentiator, the vendor revealed that over 70% of its customers are operating at petabyte plus scale. The vendor is broadly deployed across six continents in a number of verticals, including advertising, media and entertainment, manufacturing, technology, software and telecom, and health and biotechnology, among many others. The vendor has over 2EB of capacity under management across its installed base and its customer count is beginning to approach 1,000.

Qumulo Core, the vendor’s distributed scale-out file system, leverages a modernized, software-defined design that provides significant deployment flexibility — both on premises on different commodity server hardware and in the public cloud. Regardless of deployment location, Qumulo offers the same enterprise-class feature set. Its software-defined architecture allows it to be deployed on AWS, Microsoft, or Google public clouds and makes it much faster and easier to qualify new storage devices as they become available. Qumulo’s software-defined approach allows the vendor to release new production code every two weeks and de-risks upgrades (which can already be performed while the file system stays online). This approach also helps to streamline the efficiency of Qumulo engineering and release operations, a factor not lost on investors in its latest funding round (which was completed in July 2020, bringing the total invested in the company to $351 million in six rounds).

Making file system management easier, particularly as environments scaled, has been a particular focus of Qumulo, many of whose employees had originally worked at some of the first-generation scale-out file systems vendors. Handling environments with millions of small files had long presented challenges to more traditional file system designs, and Qumulo has introduced innovative features to make this more efficient. The vendor addressed perennial legacy scale-out platform issues like the capacity utilization of in-line data protection (without sacrificing durability), creating namespace wide delta differentials (without having to walk file trees), the efficiency of replication (in terms of bandwidth utilization and target write efficiency), large capacity drive rebuild times (without sacrificing data recovery), and quota enforcement. While it is beyond the scope of this IDC Market Note to discuss these in detail, customers of legacy scale-out file system platforms should look into and understand these key differences, which make the Qumulo file system much easier to manage at scale.

With the February 2022 financials release, the vendor also made other announcements. Qumulo Core 5.0 features a number of relevant capabilities, including support for all NVMe configurations on both Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) (Apollo and ProLiant) and Supermicro server hardware as well as NFSv4.1. The vendor’s already comprehensive public cloud support was improved with the release of Qumulo on Azure as a service and Qumulo Shift for Amazon S3. The S3 capability allows customers to easily export and/or import data to and from Amazon S3 while leaving data in its native object format. NVMe hybrid configurations that blend NVMe SSDs and HDDs in the same system provide additional in-system tiering options.

“Qumulo’s success since 2017 has really moved the vendor beyond start-up status.”

Qumulo has had a partnership with HPE since 2017, when HPE began selling the Qumulo File Data Platform directly off of its corporate price list in appliance configurations using HPE hardware. In April 2021, HPE and Qumulo expanded this partnership by announcing an expansion of their joint operations to Asia/Pacific geographies. The HPE relationship has been an important door opener for Qumulo with enterprises that may be somewhat shy about doing business with start-ups, although Qumulo’s success since 2017 has really moved the vendor beyond start-up status.

For enterprises faced with the deluge of unstructured data, implementing more conscious data management strategies is becoming increasingly important. Qumulo realized the importance of realtime visibility in creating a more efficient and cost-effective data management strategy early on and includes a module with its Qumulo Core platform called Qumulo Aware. Qumulo Aware is a public cloud-based component that monitors all data managed by Qumulo, regardless of on-premises or offpremises deployment locations, collecting metrics, and performing real-time operational analytics that enable customers to make better decisions about not only data placement but also data deletion. Qumulo Core includes not only the capabilities to drive more intelligent data placement decisions but also provides very efficient data movement capabilities, based on delta differential replication technology that give customers the ability to effectively manage the data life cycle at large scale.

SYNOPSIS

This IDC Market Note provides commentary around Qumulo’s recent performance and how the vendor’s evolving capabilities are targeting key unstructured data storage management trends in the industry today. In February 2022, Qumulo released its FY22 financials, exhibiting significant positive momentum and traction. With the increased focus on managing unstructured data storage brought on by digital transformation, Qumulo is well positioned to serve enterprise customer needs with a solution that is software defined, cloud native, and very easy to deploy and manage at scale. make better decisions about not only data placement but also data deletion. Qumulo Core includes not only the capabilities to drive more intelligent data placement decisions but also provides very efficient data movement capabilities, based on delta differential replication technology that give customers the ability to effectively manage the data life cycle at large scale.