Cloud Native Qumulo: Pay-as-you-Go Subscription

We are using a huge portion for NAS as the main use case for Qumulo, and we are also evaluating the S3 option.

We have a lot of cloud-native workload on Qumulo, which impacts our global collaboration efforts. We have ML workload, AI workload, and applications hosted on the cloud. We have some customer-facing applications as well, and we also utilize snapshot ability for some of the applications that actually use the ongoing on-cloud snapshot availability. We have quite a lot of cloud-native applications hosted.

The benefit of Qumulo's multi-protocol compatibility for integrating into existing workflows is pretty good. We moved a lot of our data from NetApp to Qumulo. Before we had Qumulo, we were using Cohesity NAS, so a lot of movement was actually done from Cohesity NAS, which is also one of the software-defined NAS that we had, and we moved a lot of workload from NetApp NAS as well. The migration was easy; we had a huge volume of data, but we were able to complete it with little to no problems.

The key benefits that I have seen from using Qumulo are performance and scalability. We get pretty decent performance and do not actually have to deal with the overhead of an appliance. We are just using hardware from Dell with Qumulo's guest OS.

Qumulo is software-defined, so it has a pretty light UI, and we do actually have a lot of expansion going on. We have snapshot ability in Qumulo as well, which is a pretty awesome feature to have. We have been evaluating the anti-ransomware ability of Qumulo as well, and I think we have done some testing in the QA environment that went pretty well. We also have some protection against malware. There isn't a lot of trade-off; in software, in technology, or anything, there is always a trade-off, but I think that's negligible given the kind of performance that we get.

What I appreciate about Qumulo is that it's software-defined, easy to deploy, easy to procure, easy to expand, and easy to scale, along with quite a lot of other things. It's not an appliance, so upgrades are easier, and I think so far we have had good feedback from the consumers who have been using it.

We have a lot of AI workload which is hosted on Qumulo, and there are no challenges. Of course, there are small issues here and there but nothing big. If we consider the performance also, we get pretty decent performance compared to the other software-defined NAS that we have available on the premises.

All in all, it's a very good product, resilient, with good performance and scalability that is pretty easy.

The key differences, both pros and cons of Qumulo in comparison to other technologies are that I have outlined quite a lot of pros, while the cons I can see include some challenges between the software and hardware. We have hardware that is from Dell, and software from Qumulo, so sometimes there is a synchronization issue. If we get into an issue, hardware says, 'Talk to software, Qumulo,' and Qumulo says, 'Talk to Dell.'

There is this bit of a mismatch, and I think Dell and Qumulo, or probably some other hardware vendors like Intel or HP, should have more collaborative relations so users do not end up having a lot of issues. Another thing is that I think the UI sometimes has issues during the upgrade. We immediately open an incident, and then engineers are assigned. These small issues can be considered as cons.

There are no missing features in Qumulo that I would like to see included.

I have been working with Qumulo for almost a year. It's a pretty new product in the company that I'm working with, so it's a fairly new product, but approximately one year.

We do get performance issues from time to time with Qumulo, but we get support. A lot of performance issues also depend on how the workload is handled. Suppose we put additional workload on the product, and the product cannot cater to it, of course, we will get into performance issues. For instance, if a client is making 100 million API calls, any product can encounter issues.

We are also working on some QoS and setting some quotas so we can limit how the end-user applications behave, and we're coming up with ideas to control mechanisms on the end-users.

We are leveraging Qumulo's scalable file system.

As of now, we have a footprint of almost 100 petabytes, and the team is actually in discussion with Qumulo team as we are in the process of procuring more. By the end of 2027, we are expecting at least a 50% organic data growth. Of course, that includes some metadata and some replication data as well, but we could very well hit 150 petabytes in the coming year, by 2027 end.

I would evaluate Qumulo's technical support team as pretty good. We have a dedicated engineer who is available 24/7 whenever we raise an issue. It's very good support, and we have a very good relationship with Qumulo engineers.

The support team is always available, even during the weekend. We've had quite a few issues where we needed support over the weekend, and I would say within the defined SLA, we were allocated an engineer from Qumulo.

I would rate Qumulo's tech support as a 9 out of 10.

The reason I decided to switch to Qumulo is that it was comparatively a lot less money than NetApp.

The initial setup worked well because we got support from Qumulo, and as far as the hardware procurement, that is a different story. Racking and cabling were done by our internal engineers, and the cluster build did not take too much time.

The licensing had a bit of a challenge, but we got support during migration when we moved the workflow from another product to Qumulo. That was when we faced major issues, and Qumulo support was actually pretty helpful in that scenario.

I have evaluated other solutions available in the market, including Pure and some of the Dell software-defined options, and I also evaluated Lightbits. Ultimately, we decided to go with Qumulo.

If you have AI workload, I think Qumulo is a pretty good bet. If you have ML workload, it's pretty good as well. However, if you are using a database, that isn't the product to choose. Structured data is not appropriate for Qumulo. For file-related work, absolutely proceed with it. Anything related to rows and columns is not suitable for this product, so don't go in that direction.

My main use case for Qumulo is to separate business and priorities, as I have Qumulo for NAS environments and SMB configuration for Windows hosts.

My experience mainly involves understanding that Qumulo's hardware is based on an HP ProLiant server, and the administration processes, firmware upgrades, and troubleshooting are similar to HP, with only minor differences in software administration aspects.

Qumulo has positively impacted my organization through its efficient support, as engaging with the vendor is quick, whether it involves hardware or software issues, making it easy to raise tickets and track requests.

The improvements in my team's productivity from Qumulo's quick support are evident, especially during upgrades, as we have upgraded from being two or three versions behind to the latest, thus enhancing notifications and alerting visible on the dashboard.

One of the best features Qumulo offers is the retention functionality, especially since I have production environments where data restoration is crucial, and I appreciate the snapshot policy retention which allows me to roll back quickly without delay.

I really appreciate the main dashboard of Qumulo, as it allows me to monitor multiple Qumulo boxes in one view, showing the health of each cluster and the alerts they receive.

One of the improvements I would like to see in Qumulo is the ability to send notifications to the right team whenever there is an alert indicating a potential issue, which could enhance the responsiveness of my support team.

That notification feature is the main improvement I see needed for Qumulo, along with a tool to collect logs for analysis, ideally integrated into the dashboard or as an agent tool for troubleshooting.

I have been using Qumulo for two years in a NAS environment.

Qumulo has been very stable in my experience, with only about three incidents in the last two years related to hardware repair.

Qumulo has good scalability in that it can scale out and scale in, although the current configuration is limited, and future decisions may involve increasing the cluster node.

I rate customer support for Qumulo as excellent, giving it a 10 for its top-tier service in response, resolution, and overall attention to customer needs.

I previously used different solutions before Qumulo.

One of the solutions I used before Qumulo was ANF, along with Pure Storage and Dell Isilon.

I have not seen a concrete return on investment with Qumulo, as the project scope does not allow me to assess metrics such as money or time saved.

I have experience with pricing and setup costs from other brands, specifically HP and Pure Storage, as I worked closely with vendors at my previous company, conducting cost analyses to scale infrastructure.

Before choosing Qumulo, I evaluated other options based on budget, capacity, and performance, considering NAS solutions such as Qumulo and Pure Storage, but I found Qumulo satisfactory for my needs.

I rate Qumulo a 10 overall.

I give it a 10 out of 10 because I compare it with other brands such as Pure Storage and Dell, where the incident response and coordination with vendors have been significantly quicker and clearer, highlighting the effectiveness of Qumulo's team.

I have not tried the AI capabilities regarding governance in Qumulo, but I believe it could help me improve administration.

The AI-driven features in Qumulo, such as automated alerts and analytics, have been acceptable, as they help me respond to unusual volume spikes, but I must ensure I analyze the cause before making major adjustments.

Qumulo is deployed on-premises in my organization, which operates entirely in an isolated data center without any public cloud integration.

I recommend using Qumulo, as its hardware proves to be stable with many tools available for troubleshooting and obtaining upgrade information, and the software support is immensely helpful.

My main use case for Qumulo is asset data storage. When I was working at Mercury Filmworks, we used Qumulo to store our digital assets that artists work on, so people both ways retrieve assets, work on assets and then place them back on Qumulo storage.

I find it easy to manage network shares and expand size with Qumulo. The best features Qumulo offers are security, easy management, and scalability.

Scalability stands out because we could increase size as we grew. The security side of Qumulo is easy to manage on the admin side to strictly enforce user access to certain shares.

Qumulo has positively impacted my organization with the scalability of size; we were at one petabyte and we were able to increase it to two petabytes. Increasing our storage from one to two petabytes was a smooth process, and it was easy to increase size.

Qumulo is absolutely stable. Scalability is great; you can increase or decrease the size of shares on the fly while people are still accessing the share, which is a nice feature to have.

Qumulo can be improved but not necessarily; it was fairly smooth to set up, and the support is great and easy to manage. Regarding Qumulo's AI capabilities, I think its governance and security are pretty decent; we were able to do what we needed. I find Qumulo's AI capabilities pretty accurate, as we never really had any issues with them.

I have been using Qumulo for six years.

Customer support with Qumulo is amazing; it's live support.

We have always had Qumulo.

While it is hard to say about a return on investment because we were in the animation industry, the time saved and the speed made people more productive in retrieving and sending assets to and from Qumulo storage, with uptime being 99.9%, and we never had any issues; support is great and it is live, if something ever happens, they are proactive and they will let us know.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that pricing is expensive; that was the one thing, but it is an industry standard in the animation industry or film industry so we did go with that just because it was industry standard, but other than that, it has been great; the hardware is great and the storage, it is a 10G back end, so no real complaints.

There was no other option before choosing Qumulo.

I would rate Qumulo a nine on a scale of 1 to 10. I rate it a nine because the cost is what keeps it from being a ten; it is an expensive solution, but if you do have the funds to acquire Qumulo storage, it is a great storage solution. My advice for others looking into using Qumulo is to keep in mind that the cost is expensive, but the solution itself is great, easy to use, and easy to manage for IT and to administer. I recommend Qumulo not only for the animation industry, but for any industry that is asset-heavy on data, as it is a great solution to have. My overall rating for Qumulo is nine out of ten.

Qumulo serves as our NAS platform, providing our customers with a central enterprise file storage platform where they can keep and share files. It hosts large volumes of unstructured data, home directories, project shares, and application data for our customers.

The best features Qumulo offers include a very simple management interface, good visibility into storage utilization and file analytics, and it is scalable and reliable.

I find myself appreciating the file analytics the most because our customers continually ask about the unstructured data they have, such as how many files they have, how many volumes they exist, and which user is consuming how much storage. Those kinds of analytics are difficult to obtain once we have petabytes of data.

Qumulo has positively impacted my organization by simplifying storage management while providing a single, scalable platform, reducing administrative efforts, making storage growth easier to manage, and allowing users to experience consistent performance. Visibility into storage consumption also helps with capacity planning. We have definitely seen reduced administration effort, faster provisioning of new shares, better visibility into utilization, and high availability.

Qumulo can be improved with more competitive licensing and pricing, enhanced historical analytics, and additional automation capabilities using APIs.

I have not given a rating of ten because there are some improvements Qumulo can implement. Some services are not at par with competitors today, and services such as pricing, licensing, and reporting can be better. Hybrid cloud data mobility can also be improved. However, as a file storage platform, it performs significantly better in most other areas.

I have been using Qumulo for about two years.

Stability has been good with Qumulo.

Scalability is one of the strongest features. Expanding storage capacity is straightforward, and the platform handles growth with minimal disruptions.

Customer support has been responsive, and most issues have been resolved within reasonable timeframes, although response times for lower priority cases could sometimes be faster.

We previously evaluated solutions from Dell EMC, including Isilon, PowerScale, and traditional NAS platforms, as well as NetApp before choosing Qumulo.

We have seen a return on investment in the reduction of storage administration effort, simplified management, and the ability to scale without major infrastructure redesign, which have delivered a positive return over time.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was straightforward with vendor assistance. The licensing is simple to understand, and although the pricing is on the premium side, the overall experience was good. However, cost remains one area that could be more competitive.

The advice I would give to others looking to use Qumulo is to evaluate other platforms as well, evaluate the cost upfront before choosing a solution, conduct testing of all solutions you are evaluating within your budget, and choose the best one according to performance and cost. I give this product a rating of eight.