The first formal integration between Qumulo and Commvault came at the request of customers who had been making do-it-yourself integrations, which will work much better now that the joint solution has been properly integrated and optimized.

Today,  Qumulo is announcing an integration of their Qumulo Core storage solution with the Commvault Backup & Recovery data protection offering, which accelerates the backup process of large amounts of unstructured file data, to the degree of petabytes of data and billions of files, and makes its management relatively simple.

Qumulo used to define itself in the market as extreme scale-out file storage vendor, and while those core capabilities haven’t changed, the way they present them in the market has

“It’s more of a refinement,” said Ben Gitenstein, Vice President Product Management at Qumulo. “The more time you spend with customers, the more you refine. It’s still about scale, but it’s more about who we serve and how. We emphasized that we make massive scale of data really simple. That simplicity, for both on-prem and in the cloud, is now the centre of our positioning.”

The partnership between Qumulo and Commvault came about because of requests from mutual customers.

“We had customers who used us together, who had figured out how to interconnect our API with Commvault’s backup services,” Gitenstein said. “It  worked, but it took a fair amount of work on the customers’ part. It was also slow because we and Commvault hadn’t been properly integrated and optimized, and when you are dealing with petabytes of data, speed really matters. Now Commvault and ourselves do the integration work to make it simple and easy, and also make it more scalable and reliable. So while customers did make it work without us, we can now make it work a lot easier.”

The integration simplifies customer workloads with a unified view in the Commvault Command Center for managing backup and restore jobs, and monitoring real-time job status at a glance.

“Commvault leverages a series of APIs so you can select Qumulo as a supported server,” Gitenstein indicated. “Once you do that, everything is easy to do from the Commvault interface, and then all of the Commvault magic happens, and you can create policies and move forward in perpetuity.”

Commvault leverages the  Qumulo API integration to create, delete, and compare snapshots, increasing performance and ease of use. It manages file data changes in real-time through REST APIs to show in real-time which files within the file data sets have changed, and eliminating slow ‘tree-walks’ to identify file changes. This all allows backup jobs to begin in minutes rather than hours, up to 28 times faster than before.

Commvault acquired Hedvig in 2019 to give itself an internal storage management synergy capability, but Gitenstein said that Qumulo and Hedvig address fundamentally different use cases.

“We don’t run into Hedvig much,” he indicated. “Qumulo is used as a file lake for all massive unstructured data. Hedvig is a unified solution that is more for smaller bepoke applications, not massive scale files.”

Commvault will actually take the solution to market.

“There will be joint marketing between us, but Qumulo doesn’t sell it,” Gitenstein said.