Fresh off a new round of funding, Qumulo is taking the wraps off a new hardware storage device designed to bring “nearline” storage to data center racks.
The Qumulo Nearline Archive Series is a new product from the Seattle-based company that adds to its roster of products for hybrid cloud file storage. The hardware, which was designed for standard data center configurations, introduces the concept of nearline storage — a middle grounds of sorts between “live” storage that’s nearly always available and the file storage equivalent of a dusty attic — to Qumulo’s product portfolio, which includes flash memory storage and hard-disk drives.
Like its other products, the new hardware is really a vehicle for the company’s Qumulo File Fabric software, which is what led investors to pour an additional $93 million into the company earlier this month. The software allows companies to scale their storage capacity to enormous heights without the cost overhead that forced customers of older file-storage technologies to buy enormous numbers of boxes to hit equivalent storage levels.
The Nearline Archive Series will use 12TB hard drives and special silicon to make it all work for on-premises servers, and the software allows Qumulo customers to integrate their own data center storage pods with Amazon Web Services cloud storage for a hybrid approach as needed.
