Qumulo Expands Cloud Strategy With New Google Cloud Storage Partnership

‘Now our file system will run natively in Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform,’ says Molly Presley, Qumulo’s global product marketing director. ‘Customers can also use us to migrate data between the two clouds.’

Hybrid cloud storage developer Qumulo has expanded its cloud strategy with support for its distributed file storage systems on the Google Cloud Platform.

The Seattle-based vendor also unveiled Qumulo CloudStudio, a technology for managing video production in the cloud, and Qumulo CloudDR Cluster, a technology for failing over to a cloud cluster in the event that access to on-premises data is lost.

The new additions to the Qumulo line are aimed at helping customers and channel partners take advantage of the performance and flexibility of pubic clouds, said Molly Presley, the company's global product marketing director.

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Qumulo combines the ability to scale to billions of files with the flexibility of cloud storage and the performance of all-flash storage, Presley told CRN.

The company has supported a combination of S3-compliant storage on Amazon Web Services and on-premises appliances, but is now adding Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to the mix, she said.

"Now our file system will run natively in AWS and GCP," she said. "Customers can also use us to migrate data between the two clouds."

The initial driver to working with GCP stems from the Soho district of London, England, where a lot of media and entertainment businesses make the Google cloud a part of their video development, Presley said. About 35 percent of Qumulo's revenue is driven by media and entertainment clients, she said.

Google is a strategic partner of Qumulo, including on the marketing and the technical sides, said Presley. "Google is putting a stake in the ground to be the best at media and entertainment workloads," she said.

Qumulo's support for the Google Cloud Platform is important, said Jeff DiNisco, chief technology officer at P1 Technologies, a Hermosa Beach, Calif.-based solution provider and longtime Qumulo channel partner.

"Any time a software-defined system deployed in the public cloud adds new cloud support, it shows where the market is going," DiNisco told CRN. "AWS is usually the first, and [Microsoft] Azure is quite often the second. But it seems to me that GCP is better for Qumulo customers. Most Qumulo customers will end up with large files in the cloud. GCP lends support to that."

Google Cloud Platform is better suited to larger files than are most clouds, DiNisco said.

"All three major public cloud providers compete closely on price," he said. "But for our larger customers, with multiple petabytes of data, we see them lean more to GCP in part because of cost and in part because of durability."

Qumulo’s new CloudStudio, meanwhile, is a packaged offering for developing video on the cloud, according to Presley.

CloudStudio lets customers spin off a video studio in the cloud, complete with the reference architecture that allows them to use all the specialized tools they need to do video production outside their main offices, she said.

"For example, a Hollywood company can spin up a virtual studio in Texas," she said. "They can do color correcting, rendering, whatever they need to do. Customers will use the same technologies in the virtual studio as in their on-premises studios. All the same tools. There's no need to train on new tools.

A lot of media and entertainment businesses move content around, and that content is big, Presley said. "Businesses often don't have the bandwidth they need," she said. "If they create content in the cloud, there's no need to move the data. And if they want to leverage multiple artists, they can do it remotely in the cloud."

Qumulo’s other new offering, CloudDR Cluster, offers customers the ability to replicate data to AWS or Google Cloud Platform clouds, Presley said. The capability for Microsoft Azure clouds is not yet available, she said.

"We let customers fail back to their on-prem infrastructure or to the cloud," she said. "Or they can have one instance in AWS replicate to GCP."

For a limited time, customers who purchase an on-premises Qumulo cluster will get a free one-year license for ongoing replication via Qumulo CloudDR Cluster, she said.