From AI to 4K videos to scientific research to sensor data to business analytics, we are generating data at an unprecedented rate, even outstripping Moore’s Law, which previously predicted that computing power doubled every two years. This data deluge poses a significant challenge for organizations struggling to keep pace: traditional approaches to data storage are no longer sufficient.
Traditional network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area network (SAN) solutions also face scaling and power challenges. Hard disk drives are reaching their physical limits in data density, while solid-state drives (SSDs) remain costly. Data centers, grappling with power limitations, struggle to accommodate the energy and cooling demands of ever-growing storage systems.
Ninety percent of on-premises data is unstructured, and an estimated 100-200 exabytes of this data is locked away in these systems. This is a critical problem because this unstructured data is precisely what you need to fuel AI systems, most of which reside in the cloud.
Limited access to on-premises data creates major problems for your systems that aren’t connected to the cloud. You must replicate data across multiple locations, which drives up your costs and forces you to rely on external tools to handle data transfers.
Is Cloud Storage a Viable Alternative?
Cloud storage offers a transformative alternative to traditional on-premises file storage, eliminating many of the headaches associated with managing physical infrastructure. Instead of investing in expensive hardware and dealing with regular maintenance, you can store your data in secure, remotely accessible environments managed by leading technology providers.
The cloud storage model delivers unprecedented flexibility and scalability. You only pay for the storage you actually use and can instantly scale up or down as your needs change. This removes the burden of forecasting future storage requirements and making large upfront investments in hardware that might sit partially unused. Additionally, cloud providers handle all the complexity of ensuring data redundancy, security, and availability, maintaining multiple copies of data across geographically distributed data centers.
However, cloud storage typically costs 3-20 times more than on-premises NAS, and cloud storage is optimized for its primary use case: object storage. Indeed, 90% of cloud storage is consumed as object storage.
Qumulo: A Cloud Data Platform
@Qumulo emerges as a potential solution to these challenges. It designed its cloud data platform to bridge the gap between traditional on-premises storage and cloud.
The Qumulo platform combines the scalability and cost-effectiveness of object storage with the performance and features of a high-end file system. It enables you to manage your data seamlessly across on-premises, edge, and cloud environments. Key features and benefits include:
- Global Name Space provides a unified view of data across multiple locations, including on-premises, cloud, and edge environments. This enables seamless data access for your users and applications, regardless of their location.
- Global Data Fabric provides visibility and accessibility to any data, anywhere. This fabric intelligently manages data placement and movement across different environments, ensuring your data is available where it is needed.
- Cloud-native implementation is designed to leverage the cost-effectiveness and scalability of cloud object storage, such as AWS S3 and Azure Blob.
- High Performance is achievedby using a combination of intelligent caching, data striping, and close collaboration with cloud storage providers to optimize data layout and performance. This results in a read cache hit rate of 94-95% and significantly reduced API charges compared to other cloud file systems.
- Elastic and Scalable, allowing you to adjust storage capacity and performance on demand. You can seamlessly scale from three to 100 nodes and back down again within minutes, ensuring you only pay for the resources you use.
- Run Anywhere Flexibility that can be deployed on various hardware platforms, including x86, AMD, and ARM servers, as well as in virtualized and containerized environments. This provides you with flexibility and choice in your infrastructure decisions.
- Licensing and Costs, designed to be competitive with on-premises solutions while offering the advantages of cloud storage.
- Durability, leveraging the inherent durability of object storage, using mirrored SSD EBS volumes for write caching, ensuring data is committed durably before being acknowledged. These efforts further enhance data protection, and the result is a stunning 11-12 nines of durability depending on the cloud provider. This translates to 99.999999999% and means that, statistically, only one item out of 100 billion would be lost over a given year.
Shortcomings
While Qumulo offers a promising solution, read-write functionality for Qumulo’s Global Name Space is still under development, though expected soon.
Security
Qumulo takes a multifaceted approach to security. It inherits the robust security features of the underlying cloud providers, such as AWS and Azure. The platform also enforces access controls through standard SMB and NFS protocols, and it uses encryption to safeguard data both in transit and at rest, further strengthening the platform’s security posture.
However, it’s important to understand how Qumulo fits into your overall cybersecurity stack, and for you to ensure that you deploy the appropriate access control, data encryption, and network security policies. It’s also imperative that you conduct regular security audits and vulnerability assessments to identify and address potential security risks.
Why This Matters
The relentless growth of data presents a formidable challenge to organizations worldwide. Traditional storage solutions are struggling to keep up, facing limitations in capacity, scalability, and cost. The disconnect between on-premises, unstructured data and cloud-based AI systems hinders your ability to extract valuable insights and drive innovation.
Qumulo provides a cloud data platform that addresses these challenges head-on. It offers a unified, global view of data, enabling seamless access and collaboration. The platform’s cloud-native implementation harnesses the cost-effectiveness and scalability of the cloud while maintaining the performance and features of enterprise-grade file systems. Qumulo’s intelligent caching mechanisms and flexible architecture make it a compelling solution for organizations seeking to manage their ever-growing data footprint effectively.
Organizations grappling with data storage challenges, particularly those seeking to integrate their data with cloud-based AI and analytics platforms, would be well-served to investigate Qumulo further.
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