Qumulo has introduced an architecture for multi-tenancy, Stratus, with each tenant getting its own virtually separate Qumulo environment isolated from the others by cryptography with per-tenant keys and key management systems (KMS).
The clustered, scale-out unified file and object storage supplier’s software can run on premises, in edge and datacenter sites, and in cloud-native form – the Cloud Data Fabric – in AWS, Azure, GCP and OCI, with a global namespace and support for NFS, SMB and S3 concurrently. Now Qumulo has added cryptographically isolated multi-tenancy for US federal, sovereign cloud, and regulated enterprise customers needing the assurance of data isolation with no sharing.
Qumulo CTO Kiran Bhageshpur stated: “With Qumulo Stratus’s innovative cryptographic isolation technology, sensitive data remains protected while offering the flexibility and efficiency necessary for mission-critical operations. This enables both federal and enterprise customers to concentrate on their core missions with the confidence that they can meet their regulatory compliance and security objectives without compromising performance or scalability.”
Every tenant operates as if it has its own private infrastructure while still benefiting from efficiencies because the actual infrastructure underneath, Qumulo’s scale‑out DataCore and Cloud Data Fabric, is shared while the data is not.
The company says Stratus enables customers to maintain strict data and infrastructure isolation with benefits and scalability of a shared-nothing data core. This delivers:
- Cryptographically sealed tenancy ensuring each tenant’s data at rest and in transit is invisible, even to cluster administrators.
- Disaggregated I/O and data planes – compute, cache, and protocol services are provisioned per tenant as containers, VMs, bare metal, or accelerated computing platforms, preventing “noisy‑neighbor” contention while letting organizations scale performance independently of capacity.
- The unified file and object access enables analytics pipelines and legacy apps to share the same data without copies or gateways.
- A single global namespace spans data centers and every major hyperscaler, which Qumulo says is backed by the vendor’s real‑time analytics and policy‑driven data placement. Customers can choose from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud to get the cloud services that suit them.
- Tenant‑specific services, such as per‑tenant Active Directory, Domain Name Services, Hardware Security Modules, and SIEM/audit domains, aid Zero Trust compliance for government, defense, financial services, healthcare, and service‑provider environments.
Qumulo president and CEO Douglas Gourlay said: “Enterprises and public‑sector agencies no longer have to choose between security and scale. Stratus erases that trade‑off. We’ve fused uncompromising cryptographic isolation with the elasticity of cloud and the performance of bare‑metal and accelerated computing, delivering a platform worthy of the world’s most sensitive data.”
From a competitive point of view, NetApp’s Data Fabric offers multi-tenancy via ONTAP’s Storage Virtual Machines with logical tenant data separation. It supports hybrid and multi-cloud environments via Cloud Volumes ONTAP and Azure NetApp Files.
Dell’s PowerScale OneFS provides multi-tenancy through Access Zones, SmartConnect, and Groupnets, with logical isolation of data, network, and authentication resources for multiple tenants such as departments, clients, or workloads. Public clouds are supported with PowerScale for Azure and Google Cloud, and partnerships with AWS and Oracle Cloud.
Stratus is entering limited availability and private preview and will be generally available in Qumulo Core 8 for certified on‑premises platforms, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud in the second half of 2025. A Stratus webinar is scheduled for 10:00 AM PST, Wednesday, June 23, here.
