Scale out filesystem supplier Qumulo has launched Shift for AWS. This moves files from any Qumulo on-premises or public cloud cluster into Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) transforming the files into natively accessible objects and buckets.
Once in the AWS cloud, this object data can be stored as an archive or used by AWS-resident applications and services such as Sagemaker and Rekognition. It cannot be automatically moved back to Qumulo though. Updated files are written as new objects.
Barry Russell, SVP and GM of cloud at Qumulo, emitted a canned quote: “With Qumulo Shift, customers can now move data faster and no longer worry about being stuck in legacy proprietary file data formats … . Leveraging our work with AWS, we are now able to integrate with Amazon S3 natively and enable … workloads to use cloud applications and services at any scale in Qumulo or S3.”
Qumulo says users with large video projects can move the files into AWS and burst rendering jobs to thousands of AWS compute nodes. Enterprises can migrate large datasets, such as data lakes, to AWS that could exceed the scale capabilities of other file system products.
Blocks & Files suggests that AWS’s own file services, such as EFS, could perhaps be supported by Qumulo, using the NFS format. EFS doesn’t support NFSv2, or NFSv3, but does support NFSv4.1 and NFSv4.0, except for certain features.
Qumulo’s Molly Presley, Global Product Marketing Head, disagrees. If Qumulo users want file-level operations in the cloud they may as well spin up a Qumulo file system in AWS. Also Amazon’s EFS doesn’t support SMB or as large volumes as Qumulo. Basically it’s not a good idea.
Qumulo has gained an Amazon Well-Architected designation, by which it means customers can reliably run Qumulo file services in cloud-native form on AWS.
The Shift product is included at no charge with an updated Qumulo file system which will be available in July this year.
