Long-term file storage on Azure
Azure Native Qumulo Cold (ANQ Cold) is the cloud file storage service for infrequently-accessed data at the most competitive price with zero filesystem transaction fees.
Long-term file storage on Azure
Azure Native Qumulo Cold (ANQ Cold) is the cloud file storage service for infrequently-accessed data at the most competitive price with zero filesystem transaction fees.
Finally, a solution for long-term enterprise file storage in the cloud.
Cost-per-TB as low as $9.95 per month
Scale to 100 petabytes and beyond
Free data retrieval up to 5TB per month
Why ANQ Cold?
- Maintain compatibility for your file-based workloads on-prem and in the cloud
- Simplify management of second-copies with no 3rd-party translation between file and object storage
- Provide low-latency accessibility for remote teams with no complex tiering when used with hot storage and Global Namespace
- Consolidate warm and cold data on a single, all-inclusive, feature-rich solution with NFS, SMB, and Object protocol support
- Leverage cloud-native services like AI to create new value from old data
Why ANQ Cold?
- Maintain accessibility for active workloads on-prem and in the cloud with Qumulo Global Namespace (GNS)
- Reduce the long-term TCO of your infrequently accessed data
- No complex tiering mechanisms when used with hot storage and GNS
- All-inclusive, rich feature set including NFS, SMB, and Object protocol support
- Leverage cloud-native services like AI to create new value from old data
Common use cases across industries
Second copy storage
Eliminate the capital expenditure of hardware platforms and management overhead of maintaining a secondary cluster on-prem. ANQ Cold provides the lowest price point target for your secondary storage and cost-effective long-term retention for regulatory compliance.
Warm and cold data
Archive file data in the cloud with the same or better economics as an on-prem archive while maintaining compatibility for workloads in any location. Five TB of free retrieval monthly means at ~5MB per file, you could retrieve Shakespeare’s complete body of work a million times every month!
Ransomware Protection
Backup any NAS platform, in any location, with full data immutability as cost-effective protection from ransomware and malware. Cryptographically-locked snapshots in ANQ Cold provide an ideal “Daily Golden” copy can be restored on-demand with ANQ Hot for as low as $30 per TB read.
Use case examples
Healthcare
Hybrid PACS/VNA workflow
Dayton Children’s Hospital needed to ensure rapid imaging retrieval for their clinicians without running up the costs of keeping everything in primary storage on-prem. Combining ANQ Cold and Global Namespace, radiologists can access years-old studies archived in the cloud at-will with low latency as if the data were sitting locally on-prem. With ANQ Cold, clinicians can retrieve up to 5TB per month with no additional fees. If the average CT file is 0.5 MB, that’s the equivalent of 10,000,000 CT scans per month!
Home Directory Consolidation
Your widely-distributed hybrid enterprise may be looking to simplify global unstructured data management. ANQ Cold can help centralize the bulk of your data cost-effectively in the cloud. Additionally, you can enable low-latency access for users across multiple different regions using Global Namespace. Up to 5TB of free data retrieval per month means users could access up to 2.4 million PDFs pre month with no additional retrieval cost.
Home Directory Consolidation
Your widely-distributed hybrid enterprise may be looking to simplify global unstructured data management. ANQ Cold can help centralize the bulk of your data cost-effectively in the cloud. Additionally, you can enable low-latency access for users across multiple different regions using Global Namespace. Up to 5TB of free data retrieval per month means users could access up to 2.4 million PDFs pre month with no additional retrieval cost.
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
More data being stored in and accessed from more places can complicate your business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy. Instead of managing multiple different platforms as backup and DR targets, you can use ANQ Cold as a single target for any NAS platform, from any location. Continuously replicate multiple Qumulo and non-Qumulo instances to a single ANQ Cold volume to simplify management for your BCDR strategy.
Qumulo, with their new architecture, delivers on the promise of truly less-expensive cloud storage but still done in a way where our imaging systems can access the files when they need to.
Estimate your storage costs with ANQ Cold
Estimate your storage costs
Use our pricing calculator tool to estimate your storage costs using ANQ for your workloads.
Need cloud file storage for active workloads as well? Check out Azure Native Qumulo Hot.
Compare ANQ pricing
Azure Native Qumulo Hot and Cold storage classes are billed on actual consumption.
Calculate ANQ TCO
See how your estimated storage costs with ANQ Hot and how it compares with storage on-prem.
Expansive Regional Availability
Azure Native Qumulo can be provisioned directly from the Azure Portal in regions across the US, EU, UK, Asia and Canada.
America regions:
East US: Virginia
East US 2: Virginia
West US: California
West US 2: Washington
West US 3: Arizona
North Central US: Illinois
South Central US: Texas
Central US: Iowa
Brazil South: Sao Paulo State
EMEA & Canada regions:
France Central: Paris
Germany West Central: Frankfurt
North Europe: Ireland
Norway East: Oslo
Sweden Central: Gavle
Switzerland North: Zurich
West Europe: Netherlands
UK South: London
UK West: Cardiff
Canada Central: Toronto
Canada East: Quebec City
APAC regions:
Southeast Asia: Singapore
Australia East: New South Wales
Central India: Pune
Japan East: Tokyo, Saitama
Korean Central: Seoul
UAE North: Dubai
Ready to get started?
Frequently Asked Questions
Cost per TB for ANQ Cold is as low as 9.95/month. Pricing can vary based on region. View a price breakdown here.
The minimum billable amount for an ANQ Cold instance is $2487.50 per month which includes 250 TB of useable capacity. Any additional capacity consumed billed progressively at $9.95/TB/mo.
ANQ cold is intended to be used by enterprises that need to store large amounts of infrequently accessed data for a long period of time. A low price point is important to keep their storage costs in check. In order for us to offer ANQ Cold at the lowest price point possible, we need to ensure customers are using the right type of ANQ instance for the right reason. We expect the typical size of an ANQ Cold deployment to exceed the 250TB minimum for any of its intended use cases. From there, customers will have the benefit of true elasticity to scale up (or if necessary, down) at a pace of their choosing while only paying for what they use.
No. Our pricing does not charge per-I/O transaction fees, which can be hard to predict. Our intention is to make your long term storage costs with ANQ Cold as simple and predictable as possible.
Every ANQ Cold deployment includes up to 5TB per month of data retrieval for free. This allowance should be sufficient to cover most data browsing and retrieval requirements in a one-month period. Any retrieval beyond the 5TB threshold will incur a $0.03/GB fee until the 1st of the following month, where another 5TB will be allowed once again. To put this in perspective, the average size of a CT imaging file is about 24MB. This means a radiologist would be able to restore up to about 200,000 CT scans per month without incurring any extra charge in data retrieval operations.
No. Any unused retrieval allowance does not get “credited” or rolled over to the following month.
Like the minimum charge implemented for capacity, our ability to offer ANQ Cold at its low price point is dependent on ANQ Cold being used for long-term data retention and archive rather than as live storage. We expect the 5TB allowance to be sufficient for most customers. For customers that need to read more than 5TB of data per month, we’ll pass through the incremental charges that Qumulo incurs from Microsoft Azure to customers which will be billed at $0.03 per GB over 5TB until the next month.
Yes. There is a minimum 120-day retention period for all new data added. Data deleted before 120 days will be billed as if it were left on the system for 120 days.
Much like our minimum thresholds for capacity and retrieval are based on intended use cases for ANQ Cold, we expect the typical retention period for any data that’s written to an ANQ Cold instance to far exceed 120 days. In order for us to maintain the lowest price point for ANQ Cold, we have to ensure that the service is being used as intended — as a long term repository where reads, modifications, or deletions are expected to be infrequent and minimal.
ANQ Cold includes up to 2GBps of total throughput, whether for read or write activity.
We can accommodate a temporary increase in performance demand for exceptional events like an initial ingest or an emergency restore event. Qumulo can support these events with a temporary performance increase up to 4GBps for a maximum duration of one week, after which your ANQ instance will revert back to the standard performance of 2GBps.
Contact Qumulo via your preferred channel to request an increase.
ANQ Cold is composed of LRS storage primitives for backing storage. According to Azure documentation: “Locally redundant storage (LRS) replicates your storage account three times within a single data center in the primary region. LRS provides at least 99.999999999% (11 nines) durability of objects over a given year.”
In addition, ANQ Cold uses multiple LRS managed disks to provide high performance protocol services via write-back caching. “Locally redundant storage (LRS) replicates your data three times within a single data center in the selected region. LRS protects your data against server rack and drive failures. LRS disks provide at least 99.999999999% (11 9’s) of durability over a given year.” On top of this durability guarantee, Qumulo ensures all writes are mirrored to at least 2x independent LRS volumes to effectively nullify the risk of data loss as well as to provide additional availability guarantees. See relevant Azure Documentation.
Due to the extreme levels of redundancy used to protect customer data, ANQ Cold is able to exceed the durability provided by traditional on-premise storage filers in the data center.
Based on official Microsoft Documentation regarding SLAs, Qumulo is able to offer an estimated 99.0% availability per year.
Currently, like on ANQ Hot, Qumulo absorbs the cost of data transfer fees which impacts our cost of running the service. We will eventually pass these charges to customers in the future via a single meter known as “networking egress”, and make this data available for review in Nexus.