The Promise of

Universal Scale
FILE STORAGE AT THE CROSSROADS
Contents

Executive summary 1
A perfect storm 1
Universal-scale file storage 3
Rethinking the file storage industry 5
The limitations of on-premises storage appliances 5
Inadequacy of cloud-based file solutions 5
Qumulo File Fabric (QF2) 6
How QF2 works 14
The QF2 file system 15
Real-time quotas 15
Snapshots 15
Continuous replication 16
Scalable Block Store (SBS) 16
Object and file storage 17
Conclusion 18

Copyright © Qumulo, Inc., 2017. All rights reserved.  10/2017

 Executive summary
Large-scale file storage has reached a tipping point. The amount of file-based data has been
growing steadily, and its growth has accelerated to the point that companies wonder how
they will be able to manage the ever-increasing scale of digital assets. In addition, elastic
resources and global reach of the public cloud are creating new demand for the mobility of
file-based data.

As a result, new requirements for file-based storage are emerging. The new requirements
point to the need for a universal-scale file storage system. For example, such a system has
no upper limit on the number of files it can manage no matter their size, and it can run
anywhere, whether on-premises or in the cloud.

Qumulo File Fabric (QF2) is a modern, highly scalable file storage system that spans the data
center and the public cloud. It scales to billions of files, costs less and has lower TCO than
legacy storage appliances. It is also the highest performance file storage system on premises
and in the cloud. Real-time analytics let administrators easily manage data no matter how
large the footprint or where it’s located globally. QF2’s continuous replication enables data
to move where it’s needed when it’s needed, for example, between onpremises clusters and
clusters running in the cloud.

QF2 runs on industry-standard hardware and was designed from the ground up to meet all
of today’s requirements for scale. QF2 is the world’s first universal-scale file storage system,
allowing the modern enterprise to easily represent and manage file sets numbering in the
billions of files, in any operating environment, anywhere in the world.

A perfect storm
IDC predicts that the amount of data created will reach 40 zettabytes (a zettabyte is a billion
terabytes) by 2020, and that there will be more than 163 zettabytes by 2025. This is ten times
the data generated in 2016.1 Approximately 90% of this growth will be for file and object
storage.

Machine-generated data, virtually all of which is file based, is one of the primary factors
behind the dramatic acceleration of data growth. Life sciences researchers developing the
latest medical breakthroughs use
vast amounts of file data for genome
One drop of human blood creates enough data sequences and share that data with
to fill an entire laptop computer, and some colleagues around the world; oil and
gas companies’ greatest assets are their
research projects require a million drops.
file-based seismic data used for natural
gas and oil discovery; every movie and
television program we watch is increasingly produced on computers and stored as files.
Text-based log files—data about machines, created by machines—have proliferated to the
point of becoming big data.

1. http://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/our-story/trends/files/
Seagate-WP-DataAge2025-March-2017.pdf

1
There is also a trend toward higher resolution digital assets. Uncompressed 4K video is the
new standard in media and entertainment. The resolution of digital sensors and scientific
equipment is constantly increasing. Higher resolution causes file sizes to grow more than
linearly. A doubling of the resolution of a digital photograph increases its size by four times.
As the world demands more fidelity from digital assets, its storage requirements grow.

At the same time, there have been huge advances in data analysis and machine learning over
the past decade. These advances have suddenly made data more valuable over time rather
than less. Scrambling to adapt to the new landscape of possibilities, businesses are forced
into a “better to keep it than miss it later” philosophy.

The trend toward massive data footprints and the development of sophisticated analytical
tools were paralleled by the advent of the public cloud. Its arrival overturned many basic
assumptions about how storage should work.

The cloud meant that elastic compute resources and global reach were now achievable
without building data centers across the world. Consequently, new ways of working have
arrived and are here to stay. All businesses realize that, in the future, they will no longer
be running their workloads out of single, selfmanaged data centers. Instead, they will be
moving to multiple data centers, with one or more in the public cloud. This flexibility will
help them adapt to a world with distributed employees and business partners. Companies
will focus their resources on their core lines of business instead of IT expenditures. Most
will improve their disaster recovery and business continuity plans, and many will do this
by taking advantage of the elasticity provided by the cloud.

All these conditions have come together to form a perfect storm of storage disruption that
existing largescale file systems will find hard to weather.

Users of legacy scale-up and scale-out file systems, the work horses of file-based data, find
that those systems are inadequate for a future dominated by big data. A core part of the
problem is that the metadata of large file systems—their directory structures and file
attributes—have themselves become big data. All existing solutions rely on brute force to
give insight into the storage system, and brute force has been defeated by scale. For example,
tree walks, the sequential processes that scan nested directories as part of routine manage-
ment tasks, have become computationally infeasible. Brute force methods are fundamental
to the way legacy file systems are designed and cannot be fixed with patches.

Against this backdrop of profound change, users of file storage still need to maintain and
safely manage large-scale, complex workflows that rely on collaborations between many
distinct computer programs and humans. Moreover, the traditional buying criteria of price,
performance, ease-of-use and reliability remain as important as ever, no matter how much
the landscape has changed.

Storage is at the crossroads, and the new problems must be faced. Until that happens, users
of large-scale file storage will continue to struggle to understand what is going on inside
their systems. They will struggle to cope with massive amounts of data. They will struggle
to meet the demands for global reach, with few good options for file-based data that spans
the data center and the public cloud.

THE PROMISE OF UNIVERSAL SCALE 2

 Universal-scale file stor age
Traditionally, companies faced two problems in deploying file-based storage systems: they
needed to scale both capacity and performance. In the world of big data, scale is no longer
limited to these two axes. New criteria for scale have emerged. They include number of
files stored, the ability to control enormous data footprints in real time, global distribution
of data, and the flexibility to leverage elastic compute in
the public cloud in a way that spans the data center as well.
Today, capacity means more These requirements define a new market category called
than terabytes of raw storage. universal-scale file storage.

Universal-scale file storage scales to billions of files. The notion that capacity is only
measured in terms of bytes of raw storage is giving way to a broader understanding that
capacity is just as often defined by the number of digital assets that can be stored. Modern
file-based workflows include a mix of large and small files, especially if they involve any
amount of machine-generated data. As legacy file systems reach the limits in the number
of digital assets they can effectively store, buyers can no longer assume that they will have
adequate file capacity.

THE PROMISE OF UNIVERSAL SCALE 3

Universal-scale file storage scales across operating environments, including public
cloud. Proprietary hardware is increasingly a dead end for users of large-scale file storage.
Today’s businesses need flexibility and choice. They want to store files in data centers and in
the public cloud, opting for one or the other based on business decisions only and not
technical limitations of their storage platform.

Companies want to benefit from the rapid technical and economic advances of standard
hardware, such as denser drives and lower-cost components. They want to reduce the
complexity of hardware maintenance through standardization and streamlined configura-
tions. The trend of smart software on standard hardware outpacing proprietary hardware
will only increase. Users of large-scale file storage require their storage systems to run on a
variety of operating environments and not be tied to proprietary hardware.

Universal-scale file storage scales across geographic locations with data mobility.
Businesses are increasingly global. Their file-based storage systems must now scale across
geographic locations. This may involve multiple data centers, and almost certainly the public
cloud. A piecemeal approach and a label that says “Cloud Ready” won’t work. True mobility
and geographic reach are now required.

Universal-scale file storage provides real-time visibility and control. As collections of

digital assets have grown to billion-file scale, the ability to control storage resources in real
time has become an urgent new requirement. Storage administrators must be able to
monitor all aspects of performance and capacity, regardless of the size of the storage system.

Universal-scale file storage gives access to rapid innovation. Modern file storage needs a
simple, elegant design and advanced engineering. Companies who develop universal-scale
file storage will use Agile development processes that emphasize rapid release cycles and
continual access to innovation. Threeyear update cycles, a result of cumbersome “waterfall”
development processes, are a relic of the past that customers can no longer tolerate.

Universal-scale file storage enables elastic consumption of file storage. As the needs of
lines of business surpass what central IT can provide in a reasonable time frame, access to
elastic compute resources has become a requirement. A flexible, on-demand usage model is
a hallmark of the public cloud. However, the shift to cloud has stranded users of large-scale
file storage, who have no effective way to harness the power the cloud offers.

THE PROMISE OF UNIVERSAL SCALE 4

 Rethinking the file stor age industry
Legacy scale-up and scale-out file systems are not capable of meeting the emerging require-
ments of universal scale. The engineers who designed them 20 years ago never anticipated
the number of files and directories, and mixed file sizes, that characterize modern work-
loads. They could also not foresee cloud computing.

The Limitations Of On-Premises Storage Appliances

Customers tell us they’re in a scalability crisis as the rapid growth of their file-based data
footprint exceeds the fundamental design assumptions of existing storage appliances.
These solutions are difficult to install, difficult to maintain, and inefficient. Putting in one
of these systems is usually a service engagement that can take a week, assuming the person
doing the installation is experienced. These systems have many inherent limitations, such
as volume sizes and the number of inodes, which interact and make
it challenging to avoid bottlenecks.

Legacy systems are expensive, and their inefficiency adds even more to their cost. Generally,
only 70% to 80% of the provisioned storage capacity is actually available. Performance
suffers if the disk gets any fuller. Another problem is that legacy systems were not designed
for the higher drive densities that are now available. Rebuild times in the event of a failed
disk can stretch into days.

Finally, there is no visibility into the data. Getting information about how the system is
being used is clumsy and slow. It can take so long to get the information that it is outdated
even before the administrator sees it.

Inadequacy of cloud-based file solutions

While there is tremendous demand for running file-based workloads in the cloud, existing
solutions for file in the public cloud are inadequate. These solutions are either sold by the
cloud providers themselves or by legacy storage
vendors. In the first case, the solutions are imma-
There are no mature products among ture. In the second, they apply 1990s technology to
existing cloud-based file solutions. 21st century problems.

THE PROMISE OF UNIVERSAL SCALE 5

 For example, cloud-only file systems are limited by the fact that they don’t connect with a
company’s onpremises data footprint in any way. Further, they lack important enterprise
features, such as support for the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, quotas, snapshots
and replication, that are needed for modern filebased workflows in data-intensive
industries.

The efforts of legacy storage appliance vendors to pivot to the cloud have resulted in
solutions with limited capacity and no scalable performance. This inflexibility negates the
opportunities for elastic resources that are the very reason people are turning to the cloud.

Gateway products are an alternative to cloud and legacy vendor solutions. These facilitate
the connection between on-premises file storage and cloud compute instances, but they
don’t store files where they are needed, especially for long-lived workloads.

None of the solutions provide visibility and control of the data footprint in the cloud, which
leads to overprovisioning of capacity, performance or both. In general, current solutions for
file storage in the cloud are piecemeal approaches that address only parts of the problem.
Customers are stranded in their attempts to integrate file-based
workloads with the cloud.

Qumulo File Fabric (QF2)

Qumulo was founded in 2012, as the crisis in file storage was beginning to reach its tipping
point. A group of storage pioneers, the inventors of scale-out NAS, joined forces and formed
a different kind of storage company, one that would meet the new requirements head on.
The result of their work and of the team they
assembled is Qumulo File Fabric (QF2), the
Qumulo File Fabric (QF2) is a modern, world’s first universal-scale file storage system.
highly scalable filestorage system
QF2 is a modern, highly scalable file storage
that spans the data center system that spans the data center and the public
cloud. It scales to billions of files, costs less and
and the public cloud.
has lower TCO than legacy storage appliances. It is
also the highest performance file storage system
on premises and in the cloud. Real-time analytics let administrators easily manage data no
matter how large the footprint or where it’s located globally. QF2’s continuous replication
enables data to move where it’s needed when it’s needed, for example, between on-premises
clusters and clusters running in the cloud.

THE PROMISE OF UNIVERSAL SCALE 6

 In QF2, cloud instances or computing nodes with standard hardware work together to form
a cluster that has scalable performance and a single, unified file system. QF2 clusters work
together to form a globally distributed but highly
connected storage fabric tied together with continuous
QF2 clusters work together to form
replication.
a globally distributed but highly
connected storage fabric tied together
with continuous replication.

THE PROMISE OF UNIVERSAL SCALE 7

 Customers interact with QF2 clusters using industry-standard file protocols, the QF2 REST
API and a webbased graphical user interface (GUI) for storage administrators. Here is an
example of the GUI.

QF2 has a unique ability to scale. Here are some of the capabilities that set it apart from
legacy file storage solutions.

QF2 scales to billions of files. With QF2, you can use any mix of large and small files and
store as many files as you need. There is no practical limit with Qumulo’s advanced file-sys-
tem technology. Many Qumulo customers have data footprints in excess of a billion files.
This is in stark contrast to legacy scale-out
storage which was not designed to handle
Our research organization falls between the cracks modern workflows with mixed file sizes,
for most storage vendors, with giant imaging sets and which bogs down and becomes
inefficient when there are many small
and millions of tiny genetic sequencing scraps. files. QF2 is vastly more efficient at
Finding a system that reasonably handled representing and protecting small files
than legacy scale-out NAS, typically
all our complex workflows was difficult, requiring one third the storage capacity
and in the end only QF2 was the right fit. and half the protection overhead.

— Bill Kupiec, IT Manager, Department of Embryology,

Carnegie Institution for Science

THE PROMISE OF UNIVERSAL SCALE 8

 QF2 uses block-level protection and other advanced technologies. Because it operates at
the block rather than the file level, it doesn’t have to protect each file individually, which also
contributes to its scalability.

QF2 has the highest performance. QF2 is the highest performance file storage system
on premises and in the cloud. It provides two times the price performance compared to
legacy storage systems. On premises, QF2 is optimized for standard hardware with SSDs and
HDDs, which cost less than proprietary hardware. In the cloud, QF2 intelligently trades off
between low-latency block resources and
With critical high-profile projects, you want to higher-latency, lower-cost block options.
Its built-in, block-based tiering of hot and
know exactly what you’re going to be leaning on cold data delivers flash performance at
for successful delivery. When the La La Land hard disk prices.

project came around it was make or break,
and we were never down for a moment. Qumulo
is our rock, allowing us to focus on the visual
effects with absolute confidence the data is safe.
— Tim LeDoux, Founder/VFX Supervisor, Crafty Apes
QF2 has lower cost. QF2 costs less and has
a lower TCO than legacy storage appliances
on a capacity basis, as measured by cost
per usable terabyte. QF2’s cost advantage
comes from efficient use of storage
capacity and from its use of standard
hardware.

Although it may not seem immediately obvious, QF2’s cost efficiencies also make it extreme-
ly reliable. Storage system reliability is usually measured in terms of mean time to data loss
(MTTDL). MTTDL is the average number of years a given cluster will survive before there’s a
hardware failure that causes a significant loss of data. At a minimum, MTTDLs should be
measured in the tens of thousands of years.

THE PROMISE OF UNIVERSAL SCALE 9

 While some variables that affect reliability can’t be controlled by the storage system, one
that can is the reprotect time, or how long it takes to recover data if a disk fails.

Reprotect times matter because the longer it takes to reprotect the cluster, the more vulnera-
ble the cluster is to other failures and the poorer the MTTDL. As disks become denser, data
footprints increase, and clusters grow, a legacy storage system’s reprotect times can turn into
weeks.

QF2 uses sophisticated data protection techniques that enable the fastest reprotect times in
the industry. They are measured in hours, not days or weeks. When reprotect times are fast,
reliability increases. Better reliability
means that administrators can greatly
For a critical digital media archive, reduce the level of redundancy they
need to achieve target MTTDL standards,
QF2 is the safest place I can think to put
which in turn increases storage efficien-
it short of directly in a backup vault. Soon cy and lowers cost.
we won’t need anything else but backup, QF2 makes 100% of user-provisioned
high-speed virtual storage, and QF2. capacity available for user files, in
contrast to legacy scale-up and scale-out
— Joel Hsia, Assistant Head for Systems NAS that only recommend using 70%
Development, Marriott Library, University of Utah to 80%.

QF2 provides real-time control at scale. The inability to manage large file systems (as
opposed to simply storing them) is the Achilles heel of legacy systems. For example, as
file systems get larger, a simple directory query can take days to run, which means even
standard management tasks, such as setting quotas, become impossible.

Another drawback to legacy systems is that analytics is not an integral part of the software.
It is a separate software package that is installed on external hardware and has its own
management interface. There is also no single place where administrators can get an over-
view of their system and then drill down into the details.

QF2 has real-time analytics that tell you what’s happening in your file system now. Analytics
is a part of the QF2 codebase; it is not an afterthought. Instead of running multiple com-
mands, parsing through pages of log files, and running separate programs, an administrator
can simply look at the GUI and understand what’s happening. For example, an administra-
tor can immediately see if a process or user is hogging system resources and, in real-time,
apply a capacity quota.

THE PROMISE OF UNIVERSAL SCALE 10

Managing data with QF2 is so simple it’s hard to describe
the impact. It has given us tremendous ROI in terms of
time saved and problems eliminated, and having that
reliable storage we can finally trust makes us eager
to use it more broadly throughout the company.

— John Beck, IT Manager, Hyundai MOBIS

QF2 gives you the freedom to store and access your data anywhere. QF2 is hardware
independent and can run both in the data center and in the cloud, while still offering the
same interface and capabilities to users, no matter if they are on-premises, off-premises, or
spanning both. Administrators have the freedom to take advantage of the elastic compute
resources that the cloud offers and then move data back to their data centers.

QF2 has industry-leading support. Many storage customers are dissatisfied with the
support they receive from their vendors. They find them to be unresponsive and reactive
rather than proactive. Qumulo offers responsive, personal customer support, with some
of the highest Net Promoter Scores (NPS) in the industry.

QF2 allows us to move file-based data sets to a QF2

cluster on AWS, complete our analysis, and move the
artifact back to our on-premises QF2 storage cluster,
saving us time and money. The flexibility for us to move
our file-based data where we need it to be is something
that nobody else in the market can provide at scale.

—Tyrone Grandison, CIO, Institute for Health Metrics

and Evaluation (IHME)

THE PROMISE OF UNIVERSAL SCALE 11

Qumulo customer care is absolutely
phenomenal – the best support I’ve
seen from any vendor. It’s been a
real pleasure to deal with Qumulo.
— Nathan Larsen, Director of IT,
Sinclair Oil Corporation
and figuring out how much a system will cost is far from straightforward.
QF2 has simple subscription pricing. Businesses feel
they are held hostage by the high cost of their existing
storage appliances. If they want to upgrade their
hardware after three years, they’re forced to throw
out software licenses associated with their legacy
hardware. Even if they wish to run their storage
systems for seven years instead of three, their vendor
forces them to replace their hardware by way of
exorbitant support quotes. Pricing is complicated

QF2 pricing is based on a single, simple subscription service that covers everything, includ-
ing software, updates and support.

QF2 provides cloud-based monitoring and trends. A QF2 subscription includes cloud-
based monitoring that proactively detects potential problems, such as disk failures.
We use the same agile methodology at
Sinclair, and I’ve seen first-hand the ability
to drive good products into production, so
much faster than with traditional 18-month
monolithic releases. Given Qumulo’s existing
lead on its competitors, I knew that fast
development pace would help keep it out in
front of our needs.
— Nathan Larsen, Director of IT,
Sinclair Oil Corporation
Administrators can also access the QF2
trends service, which provides historical
data about how the system is being used.
This information can help lower costs
and optimize workflows.
QF2 provides access to innovation.
Qumulo follows Agile and other modern
development practices, which means it
has many small releases that steadily
improve the product and keep it on the
leading edge of what’s possible. This is in
contrast to legacy storage vendors that
have infrequent releases that can keep
customers waiting for improvements
for years.

THE PROMISE OF UNIVERSAL SCALE 12

 QF2 has no hardware lock-in. QF2 uses standard hardware provided by Qumulo or by
partners such as HPE. In the cloud, it can use a range of instances that you can pick accord-
ing to your capacity and performance requirements.

QF2 provides a fully programmable REST API. Customers get programmatic access to any
feature or administrative setting in QF2. The QF2 REST API is built for developers. The API is
suitable for DevOps and Agile operating approaches, which are how modern application
stacks are constructed and managed, particularly in the cloud. For example, you can use
tools such as Terraform and CloudFormation to automatically spin up QF2 clusters in the
cloud.

QF2 has out-of-the-box simplicity. It seems obvious

Right now, Qumulo’s the closest thing to
an Apple unboxing, setup, and support
experience in the storage world.
that storage administrators want a system that is easy
to install and easy to manage. They have better ways to
spend their time. Unfortunately, legacy storage
systems can take days to set up and configure.

For data center installations, QF2 is extremely simple

— High-Level Executive, Top U.S.-Based
to install. Once the nodes are racked and cabled, all an
Mobile Carrier
administrator has to do is sign the end-user license
agreement (EULA), name the cluster, set up an admin
name and password and perhaps enter some IP addresses. Installation is painless. From the
moment QF2 is unboxed to when it can start serving data is a matter of hours, not days.

It is also extremely easy to create a QF2 cluster in the public cloud.

THE PROMISE OF UNIVERSAL SCALE 13

 How QF2 works
Qumulo is a new kind of storage company, based entirely on advanced software and modern
development practices. Qumulo is part of a larger industry trend of software increasing in
value compared to hardware. Standard hardware running advanced,
Software is eating the world. distributed software is the unchallenged basis of modern, low-cost,
scalable computing. This is just as true for file storage at large scale
— Marc Andreesen as it is for search engines and social media platforms.

QF2 is unique in how it approaches the problems of scalability. Its design implements
principles similar to those used by modern, large-scale, distributed databases. The result is
a file system with unmatched scale characteristics.

Here is a diagram of what’s inside a QF2 cluster.

THE PROMISE OF UNIVERSAL SCALE 14

 The QF2 file system
For massively scalable files and directories, the QF2 file system makes extensive use of index
data structures known as B-trees. B-trees minimize the amount of I/O required for each
operation as the amount of data increases. With B-trees as a foundation, the computational
cost of reading or inserting data blocks grows very slowly as the amount of data increases.

Real-time analytics with QumuloDB

When people are introduced to QF2’s real-time analytics and watch them perform at scale,
their first question is usually, “How can it be that fast?” The breakthrough performance of
QF2’s analytics is possible because of a component
called QumuloDB.
When people are introduced to QF2’s
QumuloDB continually maintains up-to-date meta-
real-time analytics and watch them data summaries for each directory. It uses the file
perform at scale, their first question is system’s B-trees to collect information about the file
system as changes occur. Various metadata fields are
usually, “How can it be that fast?”
summarized inside the file system to create a virtual
index. The performance analytics that you see in the
GUI and can pull out with the REST API are based on sampling mechanisms that are enabled
by QumuloDB’s metadata aggregation.

QumuloDB is built-in and fully integrated with the file system itself. In contrast, metadata
queries in legacy storage appliances are answered outside of the core file system by an
unrelated software component.

Real-time quotas
Just as real-time aggregation of metadata enables QF2’s real-time analytics, it also enables
real-time capacity quotas. Quotas allow administrators to specify how much capacity a given
directory is allowed to use for files.

Unlike legacy systems, in QF2 quotas are deployed immediately and do not have to be
provisioned. They are enforced in real time, and changes to their capacities are immediately
implemented. Quotas can be specified at any level of the directory tree.

Snapshots
Snapshots let system administrators capture the state of a file system or directory at a given
point in time. If a file or directory is modified or deleted unintentionally, users or adminis-
trators can revert it to its saved state.

Snapshots in QF2 have an extremely efficient and scalable implementation. A single QF2
cluster can have a virtually unlimited number of concurrent snapshots without perfor-
mance or capacity degradation.

THE PROMISE OF UNIVERSAL SCALE 15

 Continuous replication
QF2 provides continuous replication across storage clusters, whether on premises or in the
public cloud. Once a replication relationship between a source cluster and a target cluster
has been established and synchronized, QF2 automatically keeps data consistent. There’s
no need to manage the complex job queues for replication associated with legacy storage
appliances.

Continuous replication in QF2 leverages QF2’s advanced snapshot capabilities to ensure

consistent data replicas. With QF2 snapshots, a replica on the target cluster reproduces the
state of the source directory at exact moments in time. QF2 replication relationships can
be established on a per-directory basis for maximum flexibility.

Scalable Block Store (SBS)

The QF2 file system sits on top of a transactional virtual layer of protected storage blocks
called the Scalable Block Store (SBS). Instead
of a system where every file must figure out
Instead of a system where every file must its protection for itself, data protection exists
figure out its protection for itself, data beneath the file system, at the block level.
QF2’s block-based protection, as implemented
protection in QF2 exists beneath the file by SBS, provides outstanding performance in
system, at the block level. environments that have petabytes of data and
workloads with mixed file sizes.

SBS has many benefits, including:

• Fast rebuild times in case of a failed disk drive

• The ability to continue normal file operations during rebuild operations

• No performance degradation due to contention between normal file writes

and rebuild writes

• Equal storage efficiency for small files as for large files

• Accurate reporting of usable space

• Efficient transactions that allow QF2 clusters to scale to many hundreds of nodes

• Built-in tiering of hot/cold data that gives flash performance at archive prices

The virtualized protected block functionality of SBS is a huge advantage for the QF2 file
system. In legacy storage systems that do not have SBS, protection occurs on a file by file
basis or using fixed RAID groups, which introduce many difficult problems such as long
rebuild times, inefficient storage of small files and costly management of disk layouts.

THE PROMISE OF UNIVERSAL SCALE 16

 Object and file stor age
Object storage allows for very large systems with petabytes of data and billions of objects
and works well for its intended use. In fact, it’s becoming conventional wisdom to assert
that object storage technologies are the solution to the scale and geo-distribution challenges
of unstructured storage. Cloud providers believe wholeheartedly in object storage. Today,
a customer wanting to store data in the cloud is practically forced to use it regardless of
use case.

Adopting object storage in use cases for which it

Object stores have intentionally sacrificed was never intended is a poor technical fit. In
order to achieve their scale and geo-distribution
features users need and expect.
properties, object stores have intentionally traded
off features many users need and expect: transac-
tional consistency, modification of objects (e.g. files), fine-grained access control, and use of
standard protocols such as NFS and SMB, to name a few.

Object storage also leaves unhandled the problem of organizing data. Instead, users are
encouraged to index the data themselves in some sort of external database. This may suffice
for the storage needs of
standalone applications, but
A surprising amount of valuable business logic is encoded it complicates collaboration
in the directory structure of enterprise file systems. between applications and
between humans and those
applications. Modern workflows almost always involve applications that were developed
independently but work together by exchanging file-based data, an interop scenario that is
simply not possible with object storage. Further, object stores don’t offer the benefits of a file
system for governance.

A surprising amount of valuable business logic is encoded in the directory structure of

enterprise file systems. The need for file storage at scale remains compelling. QF2 provides
the scalability benefits of object without sacrificing features.

THE PROMISE OF UNIVERSAL SCALE 17

 Conclusion
At Qumulo, we believe that file-based data is the engine of innovation and that it fuels the
growth and longterm profitability of modern enterprises. File-based data is more important
than ever, and there are new requirements for how file storage must scale.

QF2 opens new possibilities for its customers, who are makers in every sense of the word.
With QF2, meeting the release date of a major animated motion picture gets easier. With
QF2, it’s feasible to achieve medical breakthroughs from multi-petabyte experimental
datasets. With QF2, identifying security threats in a billion-file network log is a daily reality.

At Qumulo, we believe that file-based data

I’ve worked with many different vendors, becomes transformative when it gives
people the freedom to collaborate, to
and while I’ve learned to expect problems
innovate, and to create. The needs of our
I’ve also learned no one’s going to knock customers, who are leaders and innovators
in so many industries, are the sole drivers
themselves out to help me. Qumulo is the
of our aggressive product roadmap.
complete opposite. I’ve never had so many
In a modern file storage system, unparal-
smart people working so hard to curve the leled reliability, scale and performance are
product toward what we’re trying to do. table stakes. A great system goes beyond
that and gives companies the global access
— Tim LeDoux, Founder/VFX Supervisor, and data insight they need to make their
Crafty Apes own dreams of greatness come true. A
great file storage system moves data where
it’s needed, when it’s needed and at massive scale, and it does these things with lower cost,
higher performance, more reliability and greater ease of use than other systems.

Qumulo is a different kind of storage company. As the creators of the world’s most advanced
file storage system, our own team of innovators puts what we believe into practice every day.
File storage at universal scale is our vision and our passion.

THE PROMISE OF UNIVERSAL SCALE 18