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Software Updates Made Your Tesla Go Faster. What About Storage Systems?

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If you’re interested in this post, you probably care about fast storage. Wouldn’t it be great if software updates could make your storage go faster? With Qumulo, they do. In fact, we make updates to Qumulo Core, our scale-out file storage system, every two weeks.

Do you drive exactly the speed limit? If you’re anything like me, driving the speed limit might as well be walking. But if you were in a Tesla before a recent software update, going into auto-pilot mode forced you to do just that. Tesla recognized a human challenge (we want to drive faster) and was able to not only fix it, but deliver it to their entire fleet very quickly. Their recent update, which now allows a Tesla to auto-drive up to five miles over a detected speed limit, is a great example of the power of agile development.

If you’re reading this post, you probably care about fast storage. Wouldn’t it be great if software updates could make your storage go faster? With Qumulo, they do. In fact, we make updates to Qumulo Core, our scale-out file storage system, every two weeks.

Software Updates Boosts Storage Performance

Just like Tesla , we at Qumulo are always looking at how people use our product in the field. We do this through a number of ways. First, the Qumulo cloud monitoring system, MissionQ, helps us remotely make sure the entire Qumulo fleet is running smoothly. But most importantly, we’re always talking directly with our customers about their Qumulo experience.

This continued contact with our customers drives each and every update to we put out. Our latest release of Qumulo Core version 2.6.5 is an excellent example of that. We test each version of Qumulo Core to SPECsfs2008, which gives us a pretty good idea about how our systems will perform according to industry standards. But, as we all know, no storage system will perform exactly the same across all workloads. And in fact, several customers had reported seeing some performance hiccups around specific workloads. So we took this instance of performance hiccups as an opportunity to create a more consistent experience. One of the results was a software update that gave a 60% performance boost to our 4U clusters. Ultimately, we made life easier for many customers, all within a timeframe of a few weeks.

In total, we have released over 60 updates of Qumulo Core to date. And each of these updates is a direct reflection of the ways people are actually using, and want to use, Qumulo. These updates are a way of life here at Qumulo. Many times, the number of lines of code that go into these aren’t necessarily many, but having agility to immediately add more value to customers, and help make their jobs a little easier, is huge. Sometimes a small change can have a huge impact.

Get in the Driver’s Seat of Your Storage

When a customer runs into something like a hiccup in performance, we turn to MissionQ to look at their cluster so we can direct our engineering efforts at their specific use case. In fact, one of our engineering teams dedicates its time to solely working with customers. The way we see it, one of the most important jobs for Qumulo is to give you the things that you want from your storage, and fast.

If we can help one customer get more from their Qumulo storage, we believe that work can have a positive impact on the entire fleet of Qumulo deployments across the continent. We send out detailed notes of each release to our customers outlining what they can expect from each update.

Additionally, we give each of our customers the power to customize their Qumulo experience through REST APIs. If you need to report on specific information about your cluster that isn’t already available, we give you the tools to create your own. And better still, the Qumulo Community offers a place for customers to share their customizations with each other. The performance boost in our version 2.6.5 update is just one of the many ways Qumulo puts you in the driver’s seat of your storage experience. Our team of experts are always on hand to answer any questions you might have, and we invite you to join us for the ride.

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