Qumulo Software Bridges File and Object Storage Divide

Data Storage Today: Key Takeaways from VMworld 2016

While the shift to object-based storage enables IT organizations to better handle massive amounts of data, it also creates the opportunity for more contention when it comes to accessing that data.

Aiming to provide more insight into potential I/O contention issues, Qumulo this week released an update to its scale-out storage software that provides insights into overall throughput analytics in addition to the number of IOPs being processed.

At the same time, Qumulo has revealed that it has formed an alliance with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) under which its storage software will become available on Apollo Series servers from HPE. That deal marks the first time Qumulo is making its software available on hardware other than its own.

Jeff Cobb, vice president of product management for Qumulo, says the company’s approach to storage is unique because it provides support for file and object-based storage in the same offering in a way that makes it simpler for IT organizations to support legacy and emerging cloud-native and Big Data applications that need to access the same data sets.

“We’re able to address scale in all of its dimensions,” says Cobb.

Other new features in Qumulo 2.5 include support for caching of metadata on solid-state drives (SSDs), snapshots that can be employed to add data protection capabilities, and erasure coding to improve overall storage efficiency.

As IT organizations make the move to object-based storage, it’s not like all the legacy applications that require access to file-based storage will simply disappear. IT organizations are going to need to figure out how to support multiple types of storage systems side by side as efficiently as possible. At its core, that means finding a way to enable multiple types of applications to share the same data regardless of whether an application was first deployed 10 years or 10 days ago.

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