Qumulo upgrades hybrid-flash hybrid cloud C-series with C-72T

Hybrid cloud-focused scale-out NAS storage provider Qumulo has added the C-72T hardware appliance and software-defined offering to its range, which brings a lower capacity entry point and scaling increment and smaller 1U physical footprint.

The company has also recently added support for Google Cloud Platform in addition to AWS, plus the ability operate and migrate between public cloud and on-premise operations, better performance via file system improvements and S3 protocol connectivity.

The C-72T now allows customers to scale in 1U increments and jumps of 72TB in capacity, where previously the minimum was 4U and 100TB.

The much scaled-down form factor is built on improvements in components and the fall in price of Intel processors and solid-state drives (SSD).

The C-72T comes with four 480GB flash drives with bulk storage in 6TB SAS-connected spinning disk hard drives. Everything goes through cache and according to predictive analytics capabilities is shipped off to bulk storage if need be.

The C-72T adds to Qumulo’s existing P-series all flash and C-series hybrid flash products. Qumulo is available as software-defined storage for use with HPE and Dell hardware and as branded appliances.

Qumulo’s ecosystem is based on its QF2 parallel file system. This scales to hundreds of hardware nodes and can be deployed on Qumulo-supplied or approved third-party hardware (currently HPE) in the customer datacentre or as software nodes in the Amazon and Google public clouds, with storage tiering in both locations.

When new hardware nodes are added the software spawns the file system to it, up to clusters of hundreds of nodes.

Qumulo’s QF2 provides a hybrid cloud Posix/Windows-compatible file system, to which has now been added S3 connectivity. Now customers will be able to run file and object workloads in the same Qumulo cluster.

This comes from a partnership with MinIO and is aimed at giving apps that can write to and from S3-compatible storage the ability to do so, said Molly Presley, Qumulo’s global product director.

These are mostly vertical-specific applications, she said, such as in life sciences and in media and entertainment, the latter of which is a key focus for Qumulo.

Elsewhere, Qumulo has announced a claimed doubling of input/ouput (I/O) performance and halving of latency in its products owing to improved efficiencies in its protocol code.

Recent cloud-related news from Qumulo has seen it announce: CloudContinuity, which allows customers to move data between the two supported cloud as well as on-premises via replication and to work from the cloud natively in case of an unplanned outage; and CloudStudio, in which film production operations can be carried out in the cloud with the same performance levels as on-premise, it is claimed.