Qumulo launches Shift

Qumulo, among the 4 file storage blitzscalers*, unveiled recently a very interesting function that deliver real value to AWS users, and of course invite others now.

Launched during the recent IT Press Tour, Qumulo Shift provides a way to copy file data to AWS S3. Data come from on-prem or cloud Qumulo cluster instances. The idea is simple and very efficient and the Qumulo team wishes to leverage tons of AWS applications.

The image below summarizes the layered model of the architecture and the place of the various data services and core functionalities.

Started on-prem with flash in mind, Qumulo has been extended to cloud with AWS, more recently GCP, and we expect soon Azure and is now a real hybrid cloud file storage offering.

With Shift, the master or reference site is still the Qumulo cluster but now coupled with AWS S3 with this capability to feed AWS applications with file data. It offers a way to offload data processing with a large spectrum of apps. One limitation from AWS S3 with the object size limit of 5TB that doesn't seem to be a blocking point for Qumulo.

"The functionality doesn't address the potential data divergence between clusters and AWS S3, the idea is really to offload processing to AWS" confirms Molly Presley, head of global product marketing at Qumulo.

Ben Gitenstein, Vice President of Products, confirms during the session that the average file size on Qumulo cluster is between 3 to 4TB. We don't yet understand if the service is not available for larger then 5TB files as applications need to consider that case with multiple objects.

This Shift service complements pretty well what Qumulo did with MinIO embedding the gateway flavor of it to an unified and ubiquitous access method to data. Locally, and in the cloud, Qumulo can expose NAS and S3 interfaces on same data, and now purely S3 from AWS. VAST Data offers same data access from NFS, SMB and S3 like Qumulo but Pure Storage can't do that.

This new service will be available in a few days, completely free, just by a software upgrade but of course limited to users under maintenance contract.

*The blitzscaler refers to the Coldago Research Map 2019 for File Storage available here and of course the book from Reid Hoffman "Blitzscaling".