Cloud Native Qumulo: Pay-as-you-Go Subscription
Modern file platform has simplified petabyte imaging workflows and now supports real-time analytics
What is our primary use case?
My main use case for Qumulo is primarily in healthcare imaging and media entertainment. It is the file-heavy workload for enterprises, and it is used extensively in healthcare. One of the companies I worked with, NTT, manages a lot of healthcare infrastructures.
A specific example of how Qumulo was used in one of those healthcare scenarios is that we used it extensively for enterprise workloads, particularly healthcare imaging.
We used Qumulo for snapshots and replication as well, and real-time analytics per file.
What is most valuable?
The best features Qumulo offers include linear scale-out, real-time analytics, multi-protocol cloud-native replication for AWS and Azure, API-driven management, and snapshots and replication, which are particularly useful in the healthcare industry and other sectors in media and entertainment.
Real-time analytics in Qumulo help me see what is going on within the environment, keeping me ahead of things.
You can use Qumulo SQS, cluster deployment, and node expansion, which are excellent for scaling out if needed.
Qumulo has positively impacted my organization by making it much easier. The snapshots and replication, along with the cloud-native replication running on HP and Dell, work on Azure and AWS, which helps considerably, especially with those being the two biggest cloud-driven systems.
What needs improvement?
Although Qumulo has been around for several years and I think they have a very good product, I cannot think of anything offhand that needs improvement. I appreciate that I can use it to check whether copies for migrations are saturating any clusters using Qumulo API scripts. As time progresses, all things improve, but nothing stands out as needing urgent attention.
Any improvements I might suggest would be nitpicking from an individual perspective. However, looking at how it has simplified processes, I appreciate the snapshots, replication, and API-driven management it offers within a cloud environment. Overall, it is a solid tool that works very well on-premises and in cloud environments.
For how long have I used the solution?
I started working with Qumulo almost four years ago.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Qumulo is very stable. Stability is a must, or else it defeats the purpose of using it. I can confidently say it is highly stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Qumulo has exceptional scalability. It scales out, which is one of the reasons it is gaining popularity and competes well in the unstructured data market, much in the way Isilon does. For storage admins or those involved with disaster recovery, the scalability model is critical, as every node adds performance and capacity without any single metadata controller, eliminating performance bottlenecks within the head node. This linear scale allows for multi-petabyte workloads, which is essential for both media and entertainment as well as healthcare's image management.
How are customer service and support?
My experience with Qumulo's customer support is that they are quick to respond. Being relatively new in this arena, they must ensure their customer support is solid to compete with established players in NetApp. My feedback is that their customer support is excellent.
I would rate Qumulo's customer support a 10. They quickly respond to my inquiries, and I have direct access to Qumulo engineers, which is invaluable. These professionals possess deep expertise in cloud deployments and NAS migrations, ensuring that I am speaking with knowledgeable individuals. If they do not have an answer readily available, they perform the necessary research to assist.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I previously used Isilon, which I worked with for a considerable amount of time. It was a substantial NAS file solution, and I can easily see the parallels between Isilon and Qumulo. When Qumulo's sales team first introduced me to the product, I recognized its similarity to Dell EMC's Isilon, leading me to learn that the makers of Qumulo were the same individuals behind Isilon.
What was our ROI?
Although I cannot share specific metrics related to return on investment, I can say that Qumulo made workloads much easier, especially within AWS. I believe this also applies to Azure. The capabilities for handling high throughput unstructured workloads and executing petabyte-scale migrations are paramount for media and entertainment or healthcare, where they can reduce the burden of long nights spent on migrations.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing Qumulo, I evaluated other options including NetApp, specifically NetApp ONTAP, and Pure Storage's FlashBlade, which were both good and I have no complaints about them.
What other advice do I have?
I believe Qumulo is great for a storage engineer because it allows me to validate migration throughput, which is part of the real-time analytics. That helps considerably during migrations. I frequently monitor hot directories and optimize cutover, particularly with Windows, and handle petabyte-scale migrations. I also track throughput metrics including read and write per node, per client, and directory, along with protocol throughput for NFS or SMB.
Regarding Qumulo's AI capabilities, I think they are doing a very good job with governance and security.
The accuracy and reliability of Qumulo's AI output are great, especially when looking at AI infrastructure storage. It helps with cyber recovery in healthcare due to the growing ransomware issue. I think they are doing a fine job, and as AI quickly advances in various directions, I feel Qumulo will get even better with it. Their AI is extremely useful for migration engineering, ransomware detection, performance tuning, and determining hot file and non-directed detections. It provides insights on client behavior and predicts performance bottlenecks, giving engineers a clear perspective, along with tiering recommendations. Overall, their AI is solid and strong, and I anticipate they will grow even stronger with further developments in AI.
My advice for others looking into using Qumulo is to ensure that it fits their needs, especially in media entertainment or large cloud environments that require handling petabytes of data with the ability to scale out. It is crucial to have a clear understanding of your requirements, particularly in environments like AWS or Azure. I am unsure about Google, but I know Azure is supported along with AWS. Therefore, if you are part of a media entertainment company or healthcare organization dealing with large quantities of images, it is worth considering how Qumulo integrates with your on-premises, hybrid, or cloud infrastructure. I give Qumulo a review rating of 9.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Reliable research data storage has supported our work and simplified hybrid cloud planning
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working in my current role for the last seven to eight years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Qumulo is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Qumulo's scalability is pretty good.
How are customer service and support?
Qumulo customer support is the best. On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate the customer support a 10.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I did not previously use a different solution before Qumulo. We used IBM, but it was not bad; it was just out of life.
How was the initial setup?
The pricing setup cost and everything was the lowest compared to other competitors, and the service being offered and the ongoing support is tremendous.
What about the implementation team?
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.
What was our ROI?
I have seen a return on investment.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing setup cost and everything was the lowest compared to other competitors.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Unified file platform has delivered secure multi‑protocol access for massive data growth
What is our primary use case?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
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.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I would rate the stability of Qumulo as a nine. It did not have any issues off the top.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What was our ROI?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Truly Elastic Enterprise File and Object
Decided to use the CloudFormation wizard to deploy which was nice and easy. The main features of Qumulo I like are the ability to scale SMB/NFS/S3 protocol performance up and down independent of capacity. Using Qumulo Cloud Data Fabric I can now burst compute jobs from on-prem to AWS when we need to urgently deliver a customer project. On a personal note, the fact users can self restore their own files using Microsoft Previous Versions saves me a lot of time each week.
Qumulo so easy to setup and deploy for enterprise file workloads
Looking for an enterprise file system to test, and Qumulo appeared to be the best on offer within the AWS marketplace. It was super simple to set up, and by default has all the enterprise features you would ever need for a filesystem. What I also like looking it to it is the elastic nature, and the ability to have hot and cold instances. There is alot more to explore as there are are a number of innovative features such as cloud data fabric from on prem storage. It's what I was looking for and will recommend to our clients.
A Good Enterprise Scale Filesystem
I've seen many products that do file in AWS...this one checks the boxes for me: scalability, enterprise features, and truly cloud native. The developers have done their homework with respect to how cloud works and, more importantly, how it's billed and have architected it accordingly.
It's definitely worth a look to see if it fits your needs.
Exceptional Cloud-Native File Storage Solution
Qumulo's Cloud Native platform has transformed our data management strategy on AWS. The deployment process is remarkably straightforward - we had our complete file data platform operational in under 15 minutes using automation templates.
The automatic scaling to petabyte capacity in a single namespace eliminates traditional storage limitations. What impressed us most is the 1-2 millisecond time-to-first-byte latencies, which are up to 100x faster than other object platforms, making it ideal for our AI and HPC workloads. The dynamic performance scaling allows us to add or remove compute instances based on demand, ensuring we only pay for what we use.
We've seen Qumulo deliver up to 80% cost savings compared to other cloud based file services. The ability to use any S3 storage tier for the persistent data layer lets us optimize costs by balancing storage expenses against data access requirements.
Multi-protocol support (NFS, SMB, REST, and S3) enables seamless integration with existing workflows. The platform's enterprise-class features including snapshots, replication, and quotas provide the reliability our organization requires. Cross-site data mobility with on-premises Qumulo deployments creates a truly hybrid solution.
For organizations seeking high-performance, scalable file storage on AWS without compromising on features or breaking the budget, Qumulo is an outstanding choice.
Scalability and reliable performance even under heavy load
Being able to scale up/down the cluster size accordingly to the workloads is definitely a plus, in order to optimize the performance and associated costs.
The usage of different flavours of S3 as backend, combined with an intelligent caching mechanism (NeuralCache) allows for an even greater flexibility and adaptability to different workloads.
The interface is very easy to use and intuitive, you have all the supported protocols at your fingertips: FTP/FTPS, SMB, NFS, S3 and REST API.
The paygo model is a plus and you can address from tens to thousands of TBs in a single cluster, being billed for effective space consumed is another huge plus.
Outperformed everything else I've tried
Once launched, Qumulo outperformed everything else i had tried in cloud from a file perspective, the ease of use and real time analytics, in combination with the Cloud Data Fabric meant im now able to create some business value in my organization and fix some data challanges ive had for years.
Highly recommended
Hey that was easy!
Simple and fast deployment! I need storage for multiple platforms and protocols and the requirement can come up quickly. Super easy to get this spun up and data flowing between different platforms using different protocols. THE DATA MUST FLOW!