Qumulo’s Azure Native Qumulo Sets New Benchmark for Cost-Efficiency in AI Storage

SEATTLE, June 17, 2024 — Qumulo today announced the industry’s fastest and most cost-effective cloud-native storage solution, as demonstrated by the latest SPECstorage Solution 2020 AI_IMAGE Benchmark result. Qumulo’s Azure Native Qumulo (ANQ) achieved an Overall Response Time (ORT) of 0.82ms with a total customer cost of just $400 for a 5-hour burst period.

Deploying cost-effective AI training infrastructure in the public cloud requires transferring data from inexpensive and scalable object storage to limited and expensive file caches. This results in added complexity and up to 40% GPU idle time, as data is being staged from object storage into local file caches.

ANQ acts as an intelligent data accelerator for the object store, executing parallelized, prefetched reads served directly from the Azure primitive infrastructure via the Qumulo filesystem to GPUs running AI training models. This innovative architecture improves GPU-side performance by accelerating load times between the object layer and the filesystem, fundamentally transforming how file-dependent AI training in the cloud should be architected.

Benchmark-Proven Performance and Cost Efficiency

The SPECstorage Solution 2020 AI_IMAGE Benchmark results underscore ANQ’s superior performance and cost efficiency. Key highlights include:

• Achieving an ORT of 0.84ms at 700 jobs, the fastest benchmark of its kind run on Microsoft Azure infrastructure.
• Utilizing a SaaS PAYGO model, metering stops when performance isn’t needed, resulting in a cost of ~$400 list pricing to run the benchmark.

Three things set ANQ apart from other cloud-native file solutions offering AI solutions for their customers:

1. True Elastic Scalability: ANQ allows customers to focus on business and technology concerns, rather than cloud-native storage infrastructure. Storage performance scales with the AI application stack demands, saving costs when there is no demand. Unlike other cloud file systems, ANQ operates without pre-provisioned volumes.
2. Low Pricing: Qumulo passes cloud economics savings directly to customers. The pricing model is based on actual storage usage (GB) and performance needed (throughput and IOPs), without the need for pre-provisioned capacity.
3. Linear Performance Scaling: ANQ’s architecture ensures that performance increases linearly as workloads increase. With an average cache-hit ratio higher than 95%, ANQ accelerates GPU-side scalability and performance, bypassing load times between the object layer and the filesystem.

To learn more about Qumulo, Scale Anywhere Data Management and Storage for the edge, the data center, and the cloud, visit www.qumulo.com.

About Qumulo

Qumulo delivers the world’s first unified Scale Anywhere platform for the hybrid enterprise and is a six-time leader in Gartner’s Distributed File and Object Storage Magic Quadrant. Qumulo is a 100% software solution that scales to exabytes anywhere unstructured data is created, consumed, stored, or managed, so businesses can operate a common platform. reducing CapEx and OpEx while moving ever faster.

Source: Qumulo