Qumulo has released its latest solution, Cloud Native Qumulo (CNQ), on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The company claims it is the world’s first cloud-native solution for unstructured data, setting new standards in performance, scalability, flexibility and cost-efficiency. It also claims that CNQ will revolutionise enterprise data management.
Kiran Bhageshpur, chief technology officer at Qumulo, said, “For the first time, customers can use CNQ on AWS to elastically burst performance or capacity at will, customizing the storage instance to meet dynamic workload demands.
“CNQ can be deployed within minutes and updated within seconds, enabling customers to run enterprise file workloads within their Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), with optional use of S3 intelligent tiering to reduce infrastructure costs further.”
Who is this aimed at?
Unstructured data makes up around 80% of the data stored by organisations. It represents a significant challenge for many of them. It also contains vast amounts of sensitive information that needs to be protected and a raft of potential business opportunities. What organisations don’t know is how much is duplicated or incomplete.
Qumulo has identified a range of industries that it Is targeting. Among those are healthcare and life sciences, media and entertainment, higher education, financial services, energy and government. Additionally, it sees regulated industries where data compliance and security are critical as a customer base it can capture.
The company says that QNC will reduce the cost and is pricing this solution at 80% less than legacy file offerings. This is due to its technology, including intelligent cache management, which ensures that all data is served efficiently from NVMe. This will eliminate the long-tail latencies that occur when transferring data from S3 to temporary caches.
Qumulo also says its technology will have other impacts beyond lower costs. Lowering the costs of the service will open up new workloads, especially those previously considered not viable. Those workloads are often associated with on-premises data centres where performance and cost have limited advanced data use.
What is in CNQ?
According to Qumulo, the key benefits of Cloud Native Qumulo (CNQ) on AWS are:
- Simplicity: CNQ can be deployed in minutes using a wide range of EC2 instance types, making it easy to get started and adapt to changing needs.
- Elasticity: Seamlessly expand and contract performance and capacity within minutes to match dynamic workload requirements without disruption.
- Scalability: Scale data footprints to exabyte levels, accommodating the growing data demands of modern enterprises.
- Durability: Benefit from the 99.999999999% durability of AWS S3, ensuring data is protected and available at all times.
- Economics: Pay only for what you use, when you use it, with optional S3 intelligent tiering to optimize costs further.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
This release makes several claims that customers will want to examine carefully. The first is how realistic the pricing model is. An 80% reduction sounds attractive even if performance does not increase. However, customers will want more than just a cost reduction to justify changing supplier.
However, Qumulo has made strong performance claims, especially around unlocking workloads. It will be interesting to see if it publishes any customer case studies to back this up. Potential customers will be interested in whether this can unlock their data, enabling more complex analytics.
Another focus for customers will be the security claims. Regulators are cracking down on data breaches and misuse with ever larger fines. If Qumulo can prove it can find sensitive data that has been missed and ensure it is protected, it will see compliance teams look at QNC.
