Qumulo adds to their relationship with HPE from 2017, which made their software available on HPE Apollo servers with a new relationship with Dell EMC, which will see their massively scalable software become available on Dell PowerEdge servers.
Peter Godman, Qumulo’s co-founder and CTO
Today, Seattle-based file storage vendor Qumulo is expanding its key vendor strategic relationships with the announcement that the massively scalable Qumulo File Fabric [QF2] software will now be available on Dell PowerEdge R740xd servers through Dell EMC and their channel partners. It complements a 2017 relationship that Qumulo entered into with HPE that made their software available on HPE’s high-density Apollo servers.
“The new relationship with Dell EMC fundamentally shows our perspective of enterprise computing in a multi-cloud world, as we look at it like a software problem,” said Peter Godman, Qumulo’s co-founder and CTO. “Making it available on the Dell servers and in their cloud data centres gives customers more choice and expands the routes to market through which customers can buy from us. In addition to Dell EMC, we have the relationship with HPE. We also provision our software on hardware that we source ourselves. Since last fall, it has also been available on the AWS cloud.”
Last fall saw Qumulo announce a major new release of their QF2 software, a universal scale file storage system, with a single file domain that scales to billions of files at the level of hundreds of petabytes, and encompasses both the data centre and the public cloud. That release added cross-cluster continuous replication capabilities, so data can move between any Qumulo clusters, whether on-prem or in the cloud.
When Qumulo entered into the relationship with HPE, which was announced at HPE’s 2017 spring Discover event in Las Vegas, it immediately became a major part of their go-to-market strategy, along with their own independent channel. They fill a scalable file offering for HPE, to better compete against Dell EMC Isilon and NetApp. The HPE relationship is still very important to Qumulo, but when they made their software release last fall, they were quite explicit that they planned to augment the HPE relationship with others.
“We are in the software business,” Godman said. “Seeing our software appear on other OEMs’ hardware is a core part of our business. The market should not at all be surprised at some future point when we announce we are available on additional OEM. That’s the kind of business model that we have.”
Qumulo, whose present leadership team has a strong connection to Isilon before EMC acquired it, competes directly with Dell EMC Isilon. Dell EMC, however, has a broad software-defined partnering strategy that recognizes the innate co-opetition within the industry.
“The part of Dell EMC that we work with is the OEM group who want to make sure that their servers are broadly adopted, and they have many relationships with software companies like ours,” Godman noted. “This is a great way for them and their partners to work with us.”
