Qumulo has announced the availability of Azure Native Qumulo Cold (ANQ Cold), part of Qumulo’s Scale Anywhere platform for the hybrid enterprise.
ANQ Cold enables Qumulo customers to cost-effectively store and retrieve infrequently accessed ‘cold’ file data at any scale.
Customers who store cold data on premises now have a cost competitive alternative to send cold data to a secure, native cloud file service in Azure.
Unlike cloud-based cold blob storage that can lead to substantial data retrieval charges, ANQ Cold includes up to 5TB of data retrieval per month.
“ANQ Cold is an industry game changer for economically storing and retrieving cold file data,” says Ryan Farris, VP of Product, Qumulo.
“To put this in perspective, hospital IT administrators in charge of PACS archival data can use ANQ Cold to instantly retrieve over 200,000 DICOM images per month without any extra data retrieval charges.
“Or, customers managing document repositories for global clients can retrieve 2.4 million PDF documents before paying for data retrieval.”
ANQ Cold provides Qumulo customers a fully featured cloud-native file services that offers:
- Cloud-simplicity. ANQ Cold’s rapid deployment gets customers running in just minutes.
- Cloud scale. A single ANQ Cold service instance can scale to exabyte-levels of cold data storage.
- Cloud-reliability. ANQ Cold leverages Azure’s 11 nines of data durability.
“In pediatrics, we have to keep imaging files until the child turns 21,” says J.D. Whitlock, CIO, Dayton Children’s Hospital.
“After a few years, it’s unlikely we will need to look at the image. But we have to keep it around for medical-legal purposes. Keeping this massive store of imaging data on secure, scalable, reliable, and cost-effective cloud storage is a perfect solution for us.”
ANQ Cold offers a familiar pay-as-you-go pricing model.
Customers pay only for the capacity consumed, while enjoying all of the traditional enterprise features they would expect of an on-premises filesystem.
ANQ Cold’s price per TB per month is $9.95 in the anchor regions of westus2 and eastus2.
Prices may be higher in other regions due to variability in regional Azure costs.
- Customers receive 5TB of data retrieval included each month. After 5TB, customers will be charged at the rate of $0.03/GB until the first of the following month, when another 5TB will be allowed.
- There is a minimum 120-day retention period – i.e., data deleted before 120 days will be billed as if it were left on the system for 120 days.
“With ANQ Cold we offer enterprises a compelling solution to protect against ransomware,” said Kiran Bhageshpur, CTO, Qumulo.
“In combination with our cryptographically signed snapshots, customers can create a “daily golden” of their on-premises NAS data, Qumulo or otherwise.
“Thanks to Azure’s security, ANQ Cold’s inexpensive data-at-rest rates and affordable data retrieval charges, customers can expect near-zero data recovery time for 2nd copies that can be instantly made available.
“This value provides seamless Business Continuity during an attack and avoids a costly ransom to the bad actors.