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Ray has known Molly Presley (@Molly_J_Presley), Head of Global Product Marketing for just about a decade now and we both just met Ben Gitenstein (@Qumulo_Product), VP of Products & Solutions, Qumulo on this podcast. Both Molly and Ben were very knowledgeable about the problems customers have with massive data troves.
Molly has been on our podcast before (with another company, (see: GreyBeards talk HPC storage with Molly Rector, CMO & EVP, DDN ). And we have talked with Qumulo before as well (see: GreyBeards talk data-aware, scale-out file systems with Peter Godman, Co-founder & CEO, Qumulo)
Qumulo has a long history of dealing with customer issues with data center application access to data, usually large data repositories, with billions of small or large files, they have accumulated over time. But recently Qumulo has taken on similar problems in the cloud as well.
Qumulo’s secret has always been to allow researchers to run their applications wherever their data resides. This has led Qumulo’s software defined storage to offer multiple protocol access as well as a completely native, AWS and GCP cloud version of their solution.
That way customers can run Qumulo in their data center or in the cloud and have the same great access to data. Molly mentioned one customer that creates and gathers data using SMB protocol on prem and then, after replication, processes it in the cloud.
Qumulo Shift
Ben mentioned that many competitive storage systems are business model focused. That is they are all about keeping customer data within their solutions so they can charge for capacity. Although Qumulo also charges for capacity, with the new <strong>Qumulo Shift</strong> service, customer can easily move data off Qumulo and into native cloud storage. Using Shift, customers can free up Qumulo storage space (and cost) for any data that only needs to be accessed as objects.
With Shift, customers can replicate or move on prem or in the cloud Qumulo file data to AWS S3 objects. Once in S3, customers can access it with AWS native applications, other applications that make use of AWS S3 data, or can have that data be accessible around the world.
Qumulo customers can select directories to Shift to an AWS S3 bucket. The Qumulo directory name will be mapped to a S3 bucket name and each file in that directory will be copied to an S3 object in that bucket with the same file name.
At the moment, Qumulo Shift only supports AWS S3. Over time, Qumulo plans to offer support for other public cloud storage targets for Shift.
Shift is based on Qumulo replication services. Qumulo has a number of patents on replication technology that provides for sophisticated monitoring, control and high performance for moving vast amounts of data.
How customers use Shift
One large customer uses Qumulo cloud file services to process seismic data but then makes the results of that analysis available to other clients as S3 objects.
Customers can also take advantage of AWS and other applications that support objects only. For example, AWS SageMaker Machine Learning (ML) processes S3 object data. Qumulo customers could gather training data as files and Shift it to S3 objects for ML training.
Moreover, customers can use Shift to create AWS S3 object backups, archives and DR repositories of Qumulo file data. Ben mentioned DevOps could also use Qumulo Shift via APIs to move file data to S3 objects as part of new application deployment.
Finally, using Shift to copy or move file data to AWS S3, makes it ideal for collaboration by researchers, analysts and just about other entity that needs access to data.
The podcast ran ~26 minutes. Molly has always been easy to talk with and Ben turned out also to be easy to talk with and knew an awful lot about the product and how customers can use it. Keith and I enjoyed our time with Molly and Ben discussing Qumulo and their new Shift service. Listen to the podcast to learn more.
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Ben Gitenstein, VP of Products and Solutions, Qumulo
Ben Gitenstein runs Product at Qumulo. He and his team of product managers and data scientists have conducted nearly 1,000 interviews with storage users and analyzed millions of data points to understand customer needs and the direction of the storage market.
Prior to working at Qumulo, Ben spent five years at Microsoft, where he split his time between Corporate Strategy and Product Planning.
Molly Presley, Head of Global Product Marketing, Qumulo
Molly Presley joined Qumulo in 2018 and leads worldwide product marketing. Molly brings over 15 years of file system and archive technology leadership experience to the role.
Prior to Qumulo, Molly held executive product and marketing leadership roles at Quantum, DataDirect Networks (DDN) and Spectra Logic.
Presley also created the term “Active Archive”, founded the Active Archive Alliance and has served on the Board of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA).
(Updated due to formatting problem, The Eds.)