Qumulo Unifies Data Across the Enterprise With Scale Anywhere Data Platform

At the recent 54th IT Press Tour, Kiran Bhageshpur, Qumulo's CTO, shared how the company is simplifying enterprise data management at scale. As unstructured data continues its explosive growth, managing that data has become an enormous challenge. Legacy storage solutions create complexity and lock-in, with data silos preventing visibility and access across locations. But Qumulo is taking a fresh approach with its Scale Anywhere Data Platform that empowers customers to store, manage, and curate data anywhere, from edge to core to cloud.

Scale Anywhere NAS

At the heart of Qumulo's solution is its Scale Anywhere NAS (network-attached storage). As Kiran Bhageshpur, Qumulo's CTO explains, this provides "exabyte scale and performance on demand" through a "software only and hybrid first" architecture. It supports multiple protocols including NFS, SMB, S3, and FTP.

Critically, it is "enterprise proven" with all the "'bells and whistles' required" by organizations. This includes key capabilities around security, integration, data protection, and data mobility across on-premises and cloud environments.

Overcoming Complexity and Lock-In 

Bhageshpur sees Qumulo as part of an industry shift from scale-up to scale-out to scale-anywhere architectures. The "old way is complex and creates platform lock-in" he says, with "complex manual processes" that are "time-consuming, people heavy, error-prone." 

Organizations also face "data blindness" with "no visibility into data stored or how to monetize it." They are locked into "only one platform to choose" from, resulting in "platform lock-in, sourcing risks, slow innovation."

In contrast, Qumulo takes an "API-first approach" with "software-defined storage" that enables organizations to "choose from many platforms, on-premise or cloud." Built-in real-time analytics provide instant visibility into data across locations.

Unifying Data Across Locations

A key Qumulo differentiator is its ability to unify an organization's data footprint across geographically dispersed locations. Bhageshpur notes several key trends driving this need:  

"Workflows are distributed, teams cross-borders and across orgs." At the same time, "90% of data is unstructured" and "doubling every 18–20 months." That data is spreading from "on-premises data centers to the enterprise edge" and into "cloud and hybrid cloud."

To address these challenges, Qumulo provides a "unified data plane" via its Global Namespace (GNS) capability. Launched in Nov 2023, GNS transparently connects an organization's Qumulo instances, providing "one view of data across all instances."

As Bhageshpur puts it: "The data hub shares data to spokes, where each geographically distributed site receives consistent updates. GNS connects data anywhere — discovery, model training, and deployment anywhere."

Powering Innovation With Real-Time Visibility

Qumulo prides itself on providing customers with real-time visibility into their data footprint to power innovation. Its built-in analytics enable organizations to "instantly know what's happening with your data, no tree walks." This allows for "improved hybrid capacity planning."

Security and data protection are also key focuses. Qumulo provides "built-in security and encryption for all common access protocols: SMB/NFS/S3/HTTPS." Its DR services, replication, and snapshots enable organizations to "minimize downtime" with "near-zero RPO."

Cost-Efficiency and Flexibility

For cloud deployments, Qumulo recently launched its next-gen Azure Native Qumulo (ANQ) service which provides "elastic performance and capacity, scale independently." Disaggregating compute and storage, allows organizations to scale each separately and only pay for the performance they consume.

The result is a "TCO comparable or better than on-premise" and "75% to 90% less expensive" than other cloud options. Bhageshpur sums it up as "SaaS with no compromises" — organizations get the flexibility and cost efficiency of the cloud without giving up enterprise functionality.

Looking Ahead

As Qumulo looks to the future, it remains focused on empowering organizations to fully leverage their data anywhere it resides. Bhageshpur sees Qumulo's scale anywhere platform as ideal for powering AI and ML use cases.  

GNS allows data science teams to access data across edge, core, and cloud for "discovery, model training, and deployment anywhere." And ANQ's "disaggregated elastic performance" means "no trapped resources" and the ability to cost-effectively "maximize GPUs" for compute-intensive AI workloads "with no data staging."

Ultimately, Bhageshpur envisions a future of "data anywhere" and "AI/ML everywhere" powered by Qumulo's "SW differentiated, federated, unbounded" platform. For developers, engineers, and architects struggling to tame the unstructured data deluge, Qumulo aims to be the key that unlocks innovation.