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Qumulo snags $24.5M to staff up its stealthy storage push

Barb Darrow — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 11:00:51 +0000

Qumulo, a stealthy startup helmed by former Isilon executives, has netted $24.5 million in funding for its enterprise storage push. The company has 18 employees now but will use its new money to hire 50 or so more engineers and some managers over the next 18 months — all in its Seattle headquarters– CEO Peter Godman told me in an interview.

Godman was mum about product plans other than to say the company will help budget-strapped companies better deal with the exploding amount of data they’re besieged with. And it has some good storage DNA — Several Qumulo execs come from Isilon, the scale-out storage company bought by EMC in 2010 for $2.25 billion. Godman was formerly director of software engineering Isilon (and CEO of Corensic.) Qumulo CTO Aaron Passey was chief architect at Isilon and CTO at Clustrix; and VP of Engineering Neal Fachan was a distinguished engineer at Isilon and a principal engineer at Amazon.

Qumulo launched last March with $2.3 million in seed funding from Valhalla Partners.

Highland Capital Partners led this Series A round that also included contributions from Madrona Venture Group and Valhalla. Peter Bell, general partner at Highland Capital Partners, joins the board of directors.

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Because Hadoop isn’t perfect: 8 ways to replace HDFS

Derrick Harris — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 21:50:13 +0000

Hadoop is on its way to becoming the de facto platform for the next-generation of data-based applications, but it’s not without flaws. Ironically, one of Hadoop’s biggest shortcomings now is also one of its biggest strengths going forward — the Hadoop Distributed File System.

Within the Apache Software Foundation, HDFS is always improving in terms of performance and availability. Honestly, it’s probably fine for the majority of Hadoop workloads that are running in pilot projects, skunkworks projects or generally non-demanding environments. And technologies such as HBase that are built atop HDFS speak to its versatility as storage system even for non-MapReduce applications.

But if the growing number of options for replacing HDFS signifies anything, it’s that HDFS isn’t quite where it needs to be. Some Hadoop users have strict demands around performance, availability and enterprise-grade features, while others aren’t keen of its direct-attached storage (DAS) architecture. Concerns around availability might be especially valid for anyone (read “almost everyone”) who’s using an older version of Hadoop without the High Availability NameNode. Here are eight products and projects whose proprietors argue can deliver what HDFS can’t:

Cassandra (DataStax)

Not a file system at all but an open source, NoSQL key-value store, Cassandra has become a viable alternative to HDFS for web applications that rely on fast data access. DataStax, a startup commercializing the Cassandra database, has fused Hadoop atop Cassandra to provide web applications fast access to data processed by Hadoop, and Hadoop fast access to data streaming into Cassandra from web users.

Ceph

Ceph is an open source, multi-pronged storage system that was recently commercialized by a startup called Inktank. Among its features is a high-performance parallel file system that some think makes it a candidate for replacing HDFS (and then some) in Hadoop environments. Indeed, some researchers started looking at this possibility as far back as 2010.

Dispersed Storage Network (Cleversafe)

Cleversafe got into the HDFS-replacement business on Monday, announcing a product that will fuse Hadoop MapReduce with the company’s Dispersed Storage Network system. By fully distributing metadata across the cluster (instead of relying on a single NameNode) and not relying on replication, Cleversafe says it’s much faster, more reliable and scalable than HDFS.

GPFS (IBM)

IBM has been selling its General Parallel File System to high-performance computing customers for years (including within some of the world’s fastest supercomputers), and in 2010 it tuned GPFS for Hadoop. IBM claims the GPFS-SNC (Shared Nothing Cluster) edition is so much faster than Hadoop in part because it runs at the kernel level as opposed to atop the OS like HDFS.

Isilon (EMC)

EMC has offered its own Hadoop distributions for more than a year, but in January 2012 it unveiled a new method for making HDFS enterprise-class — replace it with EMC Isilon’s OneFS file system. Technically, as EMC’s Chuck Hollis explained at the time, because Isilon can read NFS, CIFS and HDFS protocols, a single Isilon NAS system can serve to intake, process and analyze data.

Lustre

Lustre is a an open source high-performance file system that some claim can make for an HDFS alternative where performance is a major concern. Truth be told, I haven’t heard of this combination running anywhere in the wild, but HPC storage provider Xyratex wrote a paper on the combination in 2011, claiming a Lustre-based cluster (even with InfiniBand) will be faster and cheaper than an HDFS-based cluster.

MapR File System

The MapR File System is probably the best-known HDFS alternative, as it’s the basis of MapR’s increasingly popular — and well-funded — Hadoop distribution. Not only does MapR claim its file system is two to five times faster than HDFS on average (although, really, up to 20 times faster), but it has features such as mirroring, snapshots and high availability that enterprise customers love.

NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop

OK, the NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop isn’t so much an HDFS replacement as it is an HDFS improvement, according to NetApp and early partner Cloudera. The offering still relies on HDFS, but it reenvisions the physical Hadoop architecture by putting HDFS on a RAID array. This, NetApp claims, means faster, more reliable and more secure Hadoop jobs.

This might be a good place to say rest in peace to two other HDFS alternatives that are effectively no longer with us — KosmosFS (aka CloudStore) and Appistry CloudIQ Storage. The former was created by Kosmix (since bought by @WalmartLabs) and released to the open source world in 2007, but no longer has an active community. The latter was an attempt by Appistry in 2010 to get a piece of the Hadoop pie with its computational storage technology, but the company has since switched its focus from selling the technology to providing high-performance computing services based on it.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Panos Karapanagiotis.

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Red Hat buys Gluster for scale-out storage

Barb Darrow — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 13:56:57 +0000

Red Hat is buying Gluster and its open-source storage know-how. The acquisition will give Red Hat a strong play in the scale-out file system space as it steps up competition against incumbent IT vendors to host the next generation of enterprise applications.

In a statement, Red Hat CTO and VP of worldwide engineering Brian Stevens said:

Our customers are looking for software-based storage solutions that manage their file-based data on-premise, in the cloud and bridging between the two. With unstructured data growth (such as log files, virtual machines, email, audio, video and documents), the 90′s paradigm of forcing everything into expensive, single-system DBMS residing on an internal corporate SAN has become unwieldy and impractical.

This $136 million cash deal is just the latest instance of a big vendor buying its way into the hot scale-out storage market. Last year, for example, storage power EMC bought Isilon for its scale-out expertise. Before that, Hewlett-Packard bought Ibrix. IBM’s purchase of Storwize and Overland Storage’s acquisition Maxiscale were all part of this cloud-inflected, scale-out storage land grab, too.

In the pricier, traditional scale-up model, lots of new nodes are piled up behind a few big, pricey controller servers. In scale-out storage, companies can add more inexpensive commodity server nodes horizontally, and such additions tend to be relatively easy and inexpensive.

Red Hat said it will continue to sell and support Gluster’s existing products, and it will also incorporate Gluster technology into other Red Hat solutions. It will sell Gluster’s services via Red Hat’s usual subscription model. Sunnyvale, Calif.–based Gluster claims 150 customers, including streaming music pioneer Pandora.

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Big Data, ARM and Legal Troubles Transformed Infrastructure in Q4

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 08:00:26 +0000

Some might call this past quarter in the infrastructure space transformative. The rise of ARM-based processing suggests the days of x86 dominance might be coming to an end, while the Amazon Web Services-WikiLeaks controversy cast new light on the legal aspects of cloud computing. Big data got bigger, meanwhile, as the Hadoop ecosystem expanded, and amid all these cutting-edge technologies, two archaic topics — Novell and Java — proved they aren’t going anywhere soon. Companies mentioned in this report include Intel, AMD, Amazon Web Services, IBM, Yahoo, Appistry, VMware, Joyent and Microsoft. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

Why EMC bought Isilon for $2.25 Billion

Stacey Higginbotham — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 16:04:25 +0000

EMC Corp. said today it will acquire scale-out storage provider Isilon Systems in an all-cash deal worth $2.25 billion. The deal is another of several high-profile acquisitions and fundings in the scale-out storage space as companies try to handle the data created by more and more online activity and the availability of computing power to actually do something with that data. EMC said it will combine Isilon’s appliance with its Atmos file-based storage system and appliance for dealing with big data at huge scale. EMC expects revenue from the combined Atmos and Isilon products to reach a $1 billion run-rate during second half of 2012.

The Isilon deal brings EMC more storage gear at the commodity end, as opposed to HP’s recent bidding war and buy for 3Par, which deals with block-based storage used in highly virtualized enterprise environments. Isilon, however, does primarily file-based storage, which is more difficult to easily integrate with virtualized environments. However, file-based storage is great for storing large quantities of content — such as video files — fairly cheaply, and there’s a huge market for that as more and more information ends up online. With HP buying Ibrix, Dell buying Exanet and NetApp buying Bycast, EMC likely felt the pressure to make a move.

Storage isn’t something many people think about, but it’s a competitive space that only continues to gain relevance as we spend more and more time both consuming and creating digital information.

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Will Storage Go the Way of The Server?

Tue, 12 May 2009 16:00:35 +0000

The storage industry is on the cusp of the biggest structural change since networked storage began to substitute for direct-attached storage a decade ago. Despite being one of the fastest growing technology sectors in terms of capacity, the economics for many participants are deteriorating. Several major technology shifts will radically redefine the economics of the industry leading to slimmer margins for all but the most innovative, software-driven players. In essence, the future of storage is about storage software that increasingly absorbs intelligence that used to be hard-wired in a proprietary storage controller and array, which in turn is increasingly becoming an abundant pool of commodity disks. It is the pace of this transition that is at issue. In this report, we show how the different customer segments and associated workloads will evolve at different paces, and examine the associated opportunities for both incumbents and new market entrants.

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SC08: The New Data Center Conference?

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:15:40 +0000

The folks in charge of the SC 08 conference being held in Austin, Texas, this week have trumpeted the phenomenal growth of the supercomputing show, with attendance up by almost 10 percent from the previous year, but I’m beginning to doubt that high-performance computing is driving this growth as much as the broad changes in the data center world. As Ori Aruj, CEO a GM of switch chipmaker Dune Networks, told me when I asked why he was at the show, “This is no longer about high-performance computing and research. This is now a data center conference.”

I’m inclined to agree with him, as there are a lot of networking and storage vendors here with really large and visible booths that seem outsized compared with the HPC market opportunity. There are also attendees here from companies that have little or no business in supercomputing, such as Dune Networks, Isilon or Rackable Systems. Some of the 219 industry exhibitors (as opposed to the 118 research exhibitors) can’t possibly make enough in the HPC market to justify such a large presence at the show, although a product manager at Ciena, which makes networking gear, pointed out that HPC installations can act as an effective advertisement for other business.

So here among the 10,764 attendees at the show one might be forgiven for occasionally forgetting that Microsoft, Intel, Nvidia and a host of other consumer brands aren’t here to talk about basic computing — but supercomputing.

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