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Storage Supplement 2016

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5 STORAGE SOLUTIONS MARCH 2016 STORAGE SOLUTIONS age," Crosby promises. The company has already embraced the USB Type-C connector, the reversible-plug connector for USB devic- es and USB cabling that's meant to be future proof. "We have displayed our first USB Type-C consumer/prosum- er products and plan to launch them in March," says Crosby. "And we will give a sneak peak of Thunderbolt 3 technology at NAB." Crosby sees "big growth opportunities in the market as resolutions increase, new camera technologies are introduced and content creators need to back up and archive content. Hard drives continue to get bigger, with 10TB drives announced. SSD costs are coming down too, and we're using them in hybrid configurations, but the capacity required on the video side makes an all- SSD solution still way too expensive." QUMULO Still relatively new on the storage scene, Qumulo — which was founded in 2012 — has some hefty resumes behind it from the team that created Isilon's scale-out storage. "Qumulo was an exciting opportunity to put the band back together," quips vice president of marketing Brett Goodwin. "We're developing the next generation of scale-out storage with technologies that didn't exist when we started at Isilon." When the new company began to interview storage users in the media and entertainment space and other markets, it discovered a number of "challenges that weren't being addressed by existing solutions," Good- win says. Challenges such as data awareness (What data is being actively used? What can be archived? What's consuming performance?), hitting the limits of scale with massive amounts of content and higher res- olutions and frame rates, and the need for flexible solu- tions that can run on commodity hardware on-premises and in the public cloud. Qumulo spent its first three years building the flagship Qumulo Core, which it bills as the world's first data-aware, scale-out NAS. Launched in March 2015, it is powered by QSFS (Qumulo Scalable File System), the "secret sauce" software, which offers realtime visibility into data and storage, and leverages the price/perfor- mance of commodity server hardware and the technol- ogies of flash, virtualization and cloud. The product quickly gained a following in the post production arena where its users include Ant Farm, Atomic Fiction, Blind Studios, FotoKem, Sportvision, TELUS Studios and Zoic Studios. "At NAB, we're introducing our latest Qumulo Core software, V.1.3, which scales to more than 10 billion files and objects in a single file system with more than one million directories," says Goodwin. "It offers realtime an- alytics. Users can instantly see capacity history for the past three days, week, month, year and drill down to see what consumed the storage. Qumulo Core is available on commodity appliances, the QC24 and QC208 hybrid storage appliances, which you can get from us. These clustered systems start with four nodes and scale lin- early with additional nodes automatically — expanding storage capacity and performance." The Qumulo Care enterprise support group provides post-sales service and support, including a dedicated customer service manager for each customer and cloud monitoring to spot potential problems. "All of our appliances use a mix of high-speed flash and high-density disk storage" consisting of Intel flash SSDs and HGST 6TB and 8TB Helium hard disk drives, Goodwin notes. "The hot, or active, data stays in flash. As it cools, it's written to the spinning disks in sequential format. That gives users the performance of flash and the economies of spinning disks — a great price/perfor- mance combination." Goodwin believes the hybrid approach is optimal right now. "Our software solution is so flexible that users are able to vary the mix down the road as flash gets cheaper and higher capacity, and as the new HGST 10TB Helium hard disk drives become available." At NAB, Qumulo will demo five Qumulo Core V.1.3 stations working with media and entertainment apps, such as Adobe Premiere, Avid editing systems, Avid ProTools, The Foundry's Nuke and Side Effects' Houdini. "The past year we've gone from stealth mode to well over 50 customers," says Goodwin. "We've shipped over Qumulo offers a data-aware, scale-out NAS solution.

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