Channel-focused scale-out NAS provider Qumulo, which integrates real-time data analytics directly into storage, expands its hardware appliance line and announces a partnership with Western Digital for its HGST 10TB Hard Drives for its appliances.

Seattle-based scale-out NAS vendor Qumulo, which came out of stealth and brought its first product to market last year, has announced a series of new initiatives. They have announced their Qumulo Core 2.0 software, which supports 10TB high density hard disk drives. They announced a new partnership with Western Digital, making their HGST 10 TB drives their preferred source. They also announced three new QC-Series hybrid storage appliances, for a total of five in the family.

“We had a really good 2015,” said Brett Goodwin, Qumulo’s VP of Marketing. “We now have over 50 customers with over 40 PB deployed. We doubled the company size. We also shipped 24 different releases of our software – one every two weeks.”

While Qumulo did some initial direct sales to establish proof of concept, it has been selling entirely through channel partners for over a year, and it is committed to a 100 per cent channel model.

“We have built up our channel, and it is now north of 80 partners in the U.S. and Canada,” Goodwin said. They have about a dozen Canadian partners.

“Our focus is small to mid size resellers focused on unstructured data,” Goodwin said. Their partners include specialists in areas like earth sciences, machine data. They also have between 15 and 20 partners who are focused on commercial high performance computing applications.

Qumulo’s basic value proposition has not changed since last year.

“We build data-aware scale-out file and object storage software, which is delivered on commodity hardware, and which has real-time analytics right into the file system,” Goodwin said. The analytics provide greater visibility into which data is most valuable, where it is stored, what users or applications are accessing what files, what’s being consumed, and what should be archived, backed up or deleted.

The software is virtualized today, and will be in the cloud going forward, although Qumulo has not yet publicly announced a specific time frame for cloud availability.

The Qumulo Core 2.0 software now features erasure coding.

“Erasure coding is well suited for large scale storage systems,” Goodwin said. “It lets us use the largest capacity disk drives out there, rather than RAID, which isn’t tenable with todays large scale drives.”

System efficiency has also been improved.

“There is up to a 33 per cent increase in usable storage capacity over our previous software,” Goodwin said. This includes the ability to efficiently handle tens of billions of small and large files.

Goodwin said the systems also now have very fast rebuild times because of their hybrid nature.

‘While we can use the highest capacity drives on the market, we can also rebuild a 10 TB drive in less than an hour,” he said. Large systems can now also withstand the loss of up to two concurrent drive failures or one storage node failure without any data loss.

The analytics functionality has also been expanded.

“Capacity trends is new analytics functionality, which intelligently aggregates insights to show how available capacity has changed,” Goodwin said. It gives immediate answers indicating how storage capacity usage has changed in the past 72 hours, 30 days, and 52 weeks. Users can also drill down to see which files have been added and deleted by path.

Qumulo Core 2.0 software is available now.

Qumulo also announced three new QC-Series hybrid storage appliances – the QC40, QC104, and QC260, supplementing the QC24 and the CC208. Both the QC40 and QC260 support 10TB HDDs. But while the QC40 thus has considerably more capacity than last year’s QC24, the QC24 will remain in the portfolio.

“It gives us an absolute entry level product for small initial purchases,” said Jeff Cobb, vice president of product management at Qumulo. “The QC40 will be a better fit for any large footprint. However, the QC24 is used in smaller media and entertainment post-production houses, where they have a couple projects going at one time.”

“Many customers have started low and added multiple other appliances,” Goodwin said.

The new QC40, QC104, and QC260 appliances will be generally available in Q2. Pricing for an entry 4-node QC24 cluster running Qumulo Core 2.0 starts at $50,000.

Qumulo also announced it has chosen HGST, a Western Digital Corporation brand, as its key supplier for providing the 10 TB HDDs that can go in the QC40 and QC260. The 10TB HGST Ultrastar He10 drives are now the highest density drives available on the market. They are available now.