About two
decades ago, a number of parallel and distributed file systems were developed. The
impetus was that, when data began growing exponentially, it became clear that
scale-out storage was the paradigm to follow for large data sets. Some examples
of good scale-out file systems are WAFL (not really scale-out) , IBM Spectrum
Scale (aka GPFS), Lustre, ZFS and OneFS. All these systems have something in
common: they had their "first boot" sometime around the year
2000. They also all have their strengths
and weaknesses. Some of these systems are not really scale-out; others are
difficult to install and operate; some require special hardware or don't
support common NAS protocols; they may have scalability limits, or lack speed
of innovation.
Just the
fact that these systems were designed 20 years ago is a problem. Many important
Internet technology trends such as DevOps, big data, converged infrastructure, containers,
IoT or virtual everything were invented much later than 2000, so these file
systems are now used in situations they were never designed to handle. It is
clearly time for a new approach to file storage
Recently, I
became aware of a modern file storage system: Qumulo File Fabric (QF2).
Gartner recently named Qumulo the only new visionary vendor in the 2017 Magic Quadrant for distributed file systems and
object storage. QF2 was designed by several of the same engineers who built
Isilon roughly 15 years ago, and obviously their experiences led them to a very
modern and flexible solution.
This article
highlights some of QF2's main features that I think are worth sharing here. 1)
QF2 is hardware independent
Several
vendors say their product is independent of hardware-specific requirements.
They may have used the term "software defined." According to Wikipedia,
two qualities of a software-defined product are:
It operates independent of any
hardware-specific dependencies and is programmatically extensible.
