Azure Native Qumulo Cold (ANQ Cold) is the new cloud-native cold file data storage service from Qumulo.
Qumulo provides scalable and parallel access file system software and services for datacenters, edge sites, and the cloud with a scale anywhere philosophy. The aim is to make its file services available anywhere in a customer’s IT environment – that means on-premises, public cloud, and from any business location via clusters that are globally managed through a single namespace. It ported the Core file system software to run natively in the Azure public cloud in November last year and has now extended its Azure coverage.
Ryan Farris, VP of Product at Qumulo, said in a statement: “ANQ Cold is an industry game changer for economically storing and retrieving cold file data.”
ANQ Cold is positioned as an on-premises tape storage alternative and is fully POSIX-compliant. It can be used as a standalone file service, as a backup target for any file store, including on-premises scale-out NAS, and integrated into a hybrid storage infrastructure using Qumulo Global NameSpace – a way to access remote data as if it were local.
Qumulo CTO Kiran Bhageshpur said: “With ANQ Cold, we offer enterprises a compelling solution to protect against ransomware. In combination with our cryptographically signed snapshots, customers can create an instantly accessible ‘daily golden’ copy of their on-premises NAS data, Qumulo or legacy scale-out NAS storage.”
He claims there is no other system that is as affordable on an ongoing basis, while also allowing customers to recover to a known good state and resume operations as quickly as ANQ Cold.
In another use case, ANQ Cold provides picture archiving and communication system (PACS) customers with the ability to instantly retrieve cold images from a live file system, and has seamless file compatibility with PACS applications.
J D Whitlock, CIO of Dayton Children’s Hospital, said: “In pediatrics, we have to keep imaging files until the child turns 21. After a few years, it’s unlikely we will need to look at the image. But we have to keep it around for medical-legal purposes. Keeping this massive store of imaging data on secure, scalable, reliable, and cost-effective cloud storage is a perfect solution for us.”
Farris said: “Hospital IT administrators in charge of PACS archival data can use ANQ Cold for the long-term retention of DICOM images at a fraction of their current on-premises legacy NAS costs, while still being able to instantly retrieve over 200,000 DICOM images per month without extra data retrieval charges common to native cloud services.”
ANQ Cold has a pay-as-you-go pricing model, with customers paying for the capacity consumed. It costs $0.009/GB/month and is said to be up to 90 percent less expensive than other cloud file storage services. Its $/TB/month cost is $9.95 in the anchor Azure regions of westus2 and eastus2. Prices may be higher in other regions due to variability in regional Azure costs.
Customers have 5 TB of data retrieval included each month. After 5 TB, they’ll be charged at the rate of $0.03/GB until the first of the following month, when another 5 TB will be allowed. There is a minimum 120-day retention period. Data deleted before 120 days will be billed as if it were left on the system for 120 days.
We can expect Qumulo’s public cloud coverage to extend further as it develops its ability to provide file services in a multi-hybrid cloud environment.
