Qumulo has added NVMe SSD caching speed to its hybrid scale-out filers.. Customers are also getting new systems that will ‘end forklift upgrades’. They support automatic encryption, and faster software upgrades.
Ben Gitenstein, Qumulo’s VP of Product, told us: “We are at the fat middle of the market,” by which he means the scale-out filer sweet spot where mainstream enterprise features are required as well as simplicity.
Gitenstein sees enterprise data centre requirements increasing over time, with things such as Kubernetes support, now required by edge cases, becoming mainstream. Once they are a sweet spot, aka ‘fat middle’, requirement then we can expect Qumulo to add Kubernetes storage support.
The company builds P-Series all NVMe flash filers, C and QC Series SSD cached disk-based filers, and K-series nearline disk archive filers. These clusterable systems all use the same Qumulo Core file system. Qumulo’s software is also available running in AWS.
There are two hybrid filer model designations, the newer C models and the older QC models, with ‘C’ standing for caching. A numeric suffix is the raw storage capacity, as in C72T with 72TB of raw capacity. They have all used SATA SSDs for caching. Now Qumulo has added two new C systems; C192T and C432T, each using six faster NVMe SSDs as the caching medium. The C72T and C168T each use four SATA SSDs.
Qumulo claims they offer NVMe performance at the price of disk, but it has not not provided comparative performance datah. We expect the P-Series to be faster than the C-Series at any similar capacity point. Eg; P184T vs C192T.
The company’s latest data centre filer spec sheet lists the C72T, C168T, C192T and C432T systems, but does not mention the QC systems, suggesting they are on the way out.
Software upgrade
Qumulo today announced various software enhancements.
Dynamic Scale enables the use of newly qualified platforms with the latest processors, memory and storage devices without the need for forklift upgrades, data migrations, or complex storage pool management. The new systems can be added to existing clusters.
Qumulo Secure adds AES 256-bit software encryption at-rest to the existing role-based authentication (RBAC), audit, and encryption in-flight. All data is now encrypted automatically.
Software upgrades to Qumulo Core will complete in under 20 seconds with Instant Upgrade. This automates complete OS upgrades as well. The S3 support announced as Qumulo Shift in June, gets a visual interface.
Qumulo support for NVMe caching is available now with v.0.2. Qumulo Secure is available today in SW release 3.1.5, as is the Shift visual interface in 3.3.0. The C192T and C432T systems will be available to order later this month. Qumulo Dynamic Scale is available on December 15, 2020.
