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

My main use case for Qumulo is at my organization, where I use it for archiving, as a backup repository, and as S3 object storage for immutable storage of OpenShift workloads. I also use it for an IBM data warehouse, as a backup repository with Veeam and NetWorker, and with AFS, CIFS, and SMB for adding files. I replicate everything to the disaster site.

Out of those use cases, the most critical and valuable one for my organization is using Qumulo to back up an IBM data warehouse solution. We tried many other solutions, including native backup solutions such as TSM and NetWorker. Only with Qumulo did we manage to achieve a quick backup using private networks and multiple sessions, which allowed us to back up 20 to 30 terabytes within a backup window of 12 hours. We can also do restores within a limited restore window.

I have clients who are looking to replace their file servers with Qumulo or to use it as object storage. I offer Qumulo to them as the best scalable, scale-up solution. It is also very important for mid-sized companies, such as investment companies and insurance companies, that need a secure solution to share their valuable data. I am also going to show how Qumulo works to a big company that has massive data that needs to be archived and recalled as fast as possible.

We also use Qumulo with backup solutions, especially the S3 option that we have for immutability. In addition, we use it for the disaster recovery solutions that we already have in the bank, with two six-node clusters, a failover and failback mechanism, and all the other capabilities that this solution offers.

Qumulo has positively impacted my organization. First, it allowed us to bypass the problem we had with other solutions with the bank's data warehouse, which we could not back up within a specific period of time. It was also very valuable because it let us provide storage very easily to applications that needed it.

All customers look not only at the service itself but also at how much it costs, so the cost per terabyte matters to clients, and it is very efficient with this solution.

I can share that we managed to back up 30 terabytes in a very short period of time. In big installations, we also managed to achieve a cost per terabyte of less than 20 euros per month. This makes it very attractive to archive data or to use Qumulo as primary storage for specific solutions with limited cost. The new features, especially S3, are something we were waiting to have.

The best features Qumulo offers in my experience are that it is very easy to set up and configure, and I use it every day.

The setup and configuration are easy for me because of both the interface and the documentation. I would also like to state that it is one of the best experiences I have had regarding support. Support was the main reason we first looked at Qumulo back in 2020, when we started evaluating the solution. It was very important then, and it still is, to have a team behind the product that is able to support you at any time of the day. That is very important for me and for my clients.

In terms of performance, scalability, and integrations, I can say the performance is extremely good. Scalability is easy, as it is simple to add extra nodes or new capacity, and even the upgrade procedure is straightforward. All of these things give an extra grade and a better experience when using Qumulo in a customer infrastructure, for me as a contractor, and for the client itself.

I believe Qumulo has made a lot of changes over the last five years, and I am waiting to see what comes next. Right now, I do not have anything worth pinpointing as a problem that needs to be solved. It is important to please keep up the good work regarding support, which is very important.

The only issues I have had in the past were during the upgrade procedure. We had some issues with performance, and in some cases some nodes did not react as planned and the procedure did not go as expected, even though it is fully automated. However, this happened in only two or three cases over the last five or six years, so I am just mentioning it. I am sure that every upgrade that is deployed is becoming better and better.

I chose a rating of nine out of 10 because I would prefer not to have a new upgrade every few months, for example.

I have been using Qumulo since 2020, approximately.

Qumulo is stable.

Qumulo's scalability is very easy, and it works. We have scaled it with no issues.

The customer support is perfect, which is why I keep saying that support needs to continue at the same level as it is today, which is very important.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I rate the customer support a 10.

Previously, I used a different solution from Dell, which was ECS, the Elastic Cloud Storage solution. It was very expensive and gave the client the same value as Qumulo. In some cases, it was also slower in performance than Qumulo, which replaced it.

I have seen a return on investment in time saved. I have also seen a return in money, because we had cases where a client decommissioned older storage or did not upgrade to more expensive solutions that give the same value. Compared with traditional storage, it earned money. Time and money are the two returns I can state without a second thought right now.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that licensing is straightforward. Pricing is okay, as it also depends on Microsoft costs. For most medium and small companies, it may be prohibitive in some cases. However, in most of the cases I have handled, we had on-premises and some hybrid solutions, and it worked perfectly. We did not have any issues, and the pricing was what we expected.

Before choosing Qumulo, I evaluated other options from Dell storage, specifically the VNX solution in the past and ECS last year, and we chose Qumulo.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate Qumulo overall a nine.

Regarding Qumulo's AI capabilities, I think it covers most of the IT governance needs of at least the big companies that have IT governance. In our cases, we also have companies that do not have IT governance or do not follow it. I think it covers most of the needs that big companies have in this field.

Regarding Qumulo's AI capabilities and the accuracy and reliability of their output, AI is a tool that helps everyone, but it is still not something you can rely on 100%. In most of the cases where I have used it with Qumulo, it is okay and it helps. In many cases, however, we cannot use it because we do not have access to the internet, as it is forbidden by the company and by security policies. In the cases where I have used it, it is okay and quite fair.

Qumulo is deployed in my organization in on-premises and hybrid configurations; those are the cases I have used, at least.

The cloud provider I use for my hybrid deployment is Azure.

My advice to others looking into using Qumulo is to do a POC to see the value, looking not only at the cost per terabyte and price but also at the features and capabilities. Support, as I mentioned before, and scalability also matter a lot. I think that is the main thing that comes to my mind.

The main use case for us with Qumulo is saving our pixel data in NAS storage. The NAS storage we have available right now is Dell. Instead of going with a single upload channel, we wanted to explore HPE's Qumulo as well, and we love Qumulo too.

Right now, I do not have anything else to add about our main use case or how we use Qumulo day-to-day, as our only use case is storing pixel data.

Qumulo has impacted us positively by allowing us to achieve 20% cost savings. Earlier, we offered only Dell as a solution for NAS and pixel data. Now we have HPE Qumulo as a solution as well. Earlier, we did not have an option to offer customers another vendor unless we tested it in our lab. We got good results, so we can now propose these two solutions.

We measured that 20% cost savings on both hardware and licensing, with most of the hardware being from HPE. Maybe there is a difference in the licensing structure, which is good. I can feel it, and I can say that.

The best feature I saw in Qumulo is that the UI itself is pretty easy to use. On the dashboard, we can see many good features, such as the IOPS, the throughput, and how many clients are connecting. We can also set up historical data, although we may need to install Prometheus or Grafana to view that data. Other vendors, such as Dell, do not have a specific tool that displays everything in the UI itself. This is something that Qumulo has improved a lot.

One thing I noticed about the features is the telemetry. We can use Qumulo Cloud Telemetry. I think there is a website, and I cannot recall the name, but if you log in there, we can see all our telemetry. That is one good option. Updates are also very seamless, and I think they take less than 15 minutes. It is a very good tool for getting updates.

Also, as I see it, everything is running on Ubuntu Linux, which is a lightweight OS. Performance-wise, I feel there is not much difference between Dell and Qumulo, so both are equivalent. I see Qumulo is a little faster in terms of access, response time, and latency. Apart from that, I have nothing else to add.

There is an option I would like to see. Instead of installing a separate Grafana server to get the telemetry data, why can we not set up the same capability in the UI itself? Then we could choose the retention period of the log and get everything inside the Qumulo dashboard itself, rather than installing a separate Grafana server, because we need to maintain a separate server to collect these metrics.

There is one more needed improvement I noticed. If you compare Qumulo to Dell Isilon as a vendor, a patch update with Dell Isilon covers the hardware as well. In Qumulo, however, you have to maintain the hardware lifecycle and the software separately. This means every time you update your server, you have to update two entities: one is the hardware and the other is Qumulo. So it might be quite challenging. A great deal of time is also involved for an engineer to do both of these things, so I do not think Qumulo can directly integrate with the hardware so that we can update the Qumulo software together with the hardware patches.

Right now, I do not have any other improvements needed for Qumulo that I have not mentioned yet.

I have been using Qumulo for around two years.

Qumulo is stable.

Right now, we are running an eight-node cluster. Before procuring the hardware, we evaluate how much hardware and how many petabytes are needed, and based on that, we procure initially. As for scalability in terms of adding nodes, I think I have seen an article saying it is pretty straightforward to add nodes to the cluster and pair them up in a cluster. I believe it is pretty easy, and I guess no downtime is required to do that.

Customer support for Qumulo is very good.

I rate the customer support a 10.

Earlier, we were using a different solution, PowerScale Isilon, a mix of H700 and A3000. I think the procurement cost was too high, and so were the licensing, support, and everything else. I feel Qumulo support is very good. If you raise a ticket, you can log in to the Slack channel, post your question, and get answers immediately. That is one good thing I never noticed with Dell and other companies; they do not provide support like this.

Since the solution was approved only a year ago, it is probably not generating a profit yet. We sell this product as a solution to hospitals.

I purchased Qumulo through a direct purchase from the vendor, as HPE is our official partner.

I learned from my senior that there is a large price difference between Dell and Qumulo.

I explored many options before choosing Qumulo, including Buffalo and a few other companies such as QNAP. There are many options out there, but these are the best I have picked so far.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Qumulo between seven and eight.

I chose that number because performance-wise, it is the same as the alternatives, and I do not have anything against it. The main hiccup, as I mentioned, is that the hardware lifecycle patch is the most critical issue. If any vulnerability comes up, I can install the patch. With other vendors, one update takes care of everything. With Qumulo, however, we need to spend more time. First, you have to take down the cluster, then update the hardware, then reboot, and then go back to Qumulo and update the software there.

As I mentioned, security has improved a bit. We have a set of firewall restrictions, and we can restrict management and data VLAN traffic. These kinds of features are good, but they still need to be explored more.

Regarding Qumulo's AI capabilities, I mostly think of latency and response time.

My advice for others looking into using Qumulo is that it depends on the use case. For us, latency is the main concern. By latency, I mean that we write gigabytes of data, maybe in a week, so if any user wants to retrieve the data, it should open in seconds. That is the key part of latency. It depends on the solution and what kind of solution people are deploying in Qumulo.

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.

My main use case for Qumulo is for storage. This is a research organization where we have in-house storage capability where we store all the company data and research data, so we are using Qumulo for that.

One of the best things I love about Qumulo is the performance and the support available. They are easy to reach, and you can send them a Slack message with Level 3 engineers available to help you within seconds.

We use Qumulo on a day-to-day basis, and there are no specific examples of how it stood out, but it is robust, and we did not have any problems, and no problems is a good sign in IT.

Qumulo can do many more things, and the team at Qumulo is also adding new features and capabilities to it.

There are other capabilities of Qumulo which we are planning to use in the future. Basically, I forgot the name, but it gives you the opportunity to create another Qumulo instance in Microsoft Azure and have another copy there, so in case of disaster, you have another copy in the cloud available which you can use.

I have not used the AI capability of Qumulo as of now, so I cannot comment on its governance and security.

I have not used the AI capability of Qumulo, so I cannot comment on its accuracy and reliability of output.

I have been working in my current role for the last seven to eight years.

Qumulo is stable.

Qumulo's scalability is pretty good.

Qumulo customer support is the best. On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate the customer support a 10.

I did not previously use a different solution before Qumulo. We used IBM, but it was not bad; it was just out of life.

The pricing setup cost and everything was the lowest compared to other competitors, and the service being offered and the ongoing support is tremendous.

Currently, Qumulo is deployed as an on-premises infrastructure, and an HPE engineer helped us with the data migration. We are also exploring the hybrid environment.

I have seen a return on investment.

The pricing setup cost and everything was the lowest compared to other competitors.

All the other available options in the market at that time were pretty expensive with a similar amount of storage being provided or similar solutions being offered, so there is a huge difference in price.

I would rate Qumulo a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. I am really satisfied with the service being offered, and it is basically value for the money. We are exploring Microsoft Azure for our hybrid environment. Please explore this option for sure; this is one of the best solutions available in the market, and even though maybe not many are using it, it is worth exploring. My overall review rating for Qumulo is 10.

Qumulo is a distributor system that represents names based on similar tools. We had a few petabytes of data, and certain application teams were working with it during the rollout to understand what we wanted to use it for. It is basically set up for some of the database and application teams.

Qumulo has improved the way my organization functions in several ways. One of the biggest improvements was authentication, which is a security feature for SMB and FTP. We set up the clusters for Qumulo, and the main spaces are accessed seamlessly for Windows and Linux, which we were using it for. That layer of authentication was great. Depending on who you are working with, we were using either standard LDAP or another directory. I work with a number of different compute end users in connecting the data files. For example, with it being a NAS, we were able to move beyond traditional NAS limitations. Different groups could access these files and authenticate through Active Directory, Windows, Mac, or Linux, and the security feature really helped a lot as far as authentication.

The most valuable feature in Qumulo is the scaling feature, as Qumulo file data platform is optimized for scale, so we could support petabytes of data, billions of files, millions of operations, and thousands of users.

The creators of Qumulo were the ones who created Isilon, and I had a conversation with them, so any of the features within Isilon may need tweaking, but I think they resolved it here. In the year that I worked with it, I did not see anything that I had an issue with. The security is great, and it works with cloud technologies, being a hands-based tool, so you can use it with AWS or Microsoft Azure. It programs very easily. There are REST APIs, and there is a cloud connection. The management and program layer is made up of three capabilities: API, the command line, and a visual interface. In the year that I worked with it and brought it in, I think it has been effective.

The only thing I would like to see added to Qumulo is for the interface to improve visually, more in line with vCenter, but that is just my thought. Overall, I appreciate it.

I have been using Qumulo for about a year. Qumulo is an application that is now owned by HP, and I was working with HP for a contract for a year, so I was involved with the implementation of it and also managing it.

I would rate the stability of Qumulo as a nine. It did not have any issues off the top.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate the scalability of Qumulo as a nine. I really would. I remember the version we used was 2.1 for Windows. I would give it a nine. I was really impressed with it as soon as I saw it, and it immediately made me think of Isilon. It is really scalable and easy to use for our end users. You can lock down files for a particular individual to use.

I would rate their technical support as a ten, as they are very quick to respond. They respond via email or phone calls, working with the individuals who are implementing it and how it would work with our regular users who will call. They respond rather quickly. For me, it is a ten, and I do not believe any of the application team owners had too many problems.

The initial deployment of Qumulo is actually pretty straightforward. We worked with the Qumulo team, and this was an individual company that HP purchased, so they brought it in, set everything up, and walked us through it. They explained that it takes some effort, and of course, we had to set up the security on our end for them to be able to access the setup things on the servers. After that, they walked us through what they were doing and how to use it, so it is pretty straightforward.

I have seen a return on investment with Qumulo. With a particular database and application team users, they were happy with it, the access they had, and how they can lock down files. There is a main manager of Qumulo within the groups, and you can set it up. Qumulo is a revenue competitor with Isilon, NetApp, Ampere Stewart, and PowerScale, so this is HP's purchase to compete with those particular companies. They are pretty happy with it rolling out in-house, and they intend to expand it to other groups. I appreciate what I am seeing; it is a great tool.

I have plans to increase the usage of Qumulo in the future. We have brought it in to work with specific teams or test groups and test users, seeing how they enjoy it and how they feel about it. We have not had any complaints when we rolled it out. In certain instances, with AWS users, we have had to bring in a few kinks, maybe connectivity issues, that were resolved. It is a new rollout, but we intend to expand it in-house.

I was not involved on the pricing side of Qumulo, but with HP bringing it in, my thought is they see a great deal of potential for it as it is competing with Dell EMC and NetApp in this area. So they felt that purchasing this company would make them quite competitive.

My advice for someone who would use Qumulo is to probably go to their site, do some research, and communicate with some of the individuals or online salespeople to give you an idea. There are probably some guides you can obtain. I think a lot of admins would appreciate this tool, as it has the API and tools to work with the cloud, and the support team is pretty solid. You can create SMB shares and NFS shares, and it works with AD and LDAP identity services. I would say to reach out to human level support, go to their website, and do a little research on it. I think they would appreciate it.

Overall, I would rate Qumulo a nine. I appreciate that it does snapshots, and you could use replication. It works with Qumulo shift and works with Amazon S3. The object store replication enables any of Qumulo file data platforms to treat a cloud object storage service as Amazon S3 as a suitable replication target, so users can copy from Qumulo namespace to a cloud store. That is great for storage, and it has quotas to enable users to control the growth of any of the subsets. I think it is something that anyone in AWS and the cloud technologies would appreciate. The file system is expandable, grows quickly, and has failure recovery. So it is a great application. I would advise anyone who is interested in it to contact the support team, and they can set up a meeting, such as a Zoom session, and walk them through it by sharing screens to give them an idea of it. HP purchased Qumulo to compete with EMC's Isilon and NetApp. So it is a solid tool. I work with both of those solutions, and what I am seeing immediately reminded me of Isilon as soon as I saw it, so I knew what was going on there. My overall rating for Qumulo is nine out of ten.