Today, Qumulo, the simple way to manage exabyte-scale data anywhere, announced the availability of Azure Native Qumulo Cold (ANQ Cold), part of Qumulo’s Scale AnywhereTM platform for the hybrid enterprise. ANQ Cold is the world’s first cloud-native service to cost-effectively store and retrieve infrequently accessed “cold” file data at any scale. At just $0.009 per GB per month, ANQ Cold is up to 90% less expensive than other cloud file storage services.

With ANQ Cold, for the first time ever, customers with large-scale, infrequently accessed data in cumbersome, legacy scale-out NAS archive offerings and tape archives have a compelling and cost-effective cloud offering.  ANQ Cold is fully POSIX compliant, guaranteeing customer’s file-dependent applications need not change.

ANQ Cold can be used as a stand-alone file service, as a backup target for any file store, including on-premises legacy scale-out NAS, and can be integrated into a hybrid storage infrastructure using Qumulo Global NameSpace, the way to access remote data as if it were local. 

“ANQ Cold is an industry game changer for economically storing and retrieving cold file data,” says Ryan Farris, VP of Product at Qumulo. “To put this in perspective with a common use case, hospital IT administrators in charge of PACS archival data can use ANQ Cold for the long-term retention of DICOM images at a fraction of their current on-premises legacy NAS costs, while still being able to instantly retrieve over 200,000 DICOM images per month without extra data retrieval charges common to native cloud services.”

ANQ Cold, the only cloud-native file service to cost-effectively store and retrieve infrequently accessed “cold” file data at any scale at any scale, provides Qumulo customers:

• Cloud simplicity. ANQ Cold’s rapid deployment, directly from the familiar Azure portal interface, gets customers running in just minutes. 
• Cloud scale. A single ANQ Cold service instance can scale to an exabyte-level file system in a single namespace
• Cloud-reliability. ANQ Cold leverages Azure’s 11 nines of data durability.
• Cloud-elasticity. Unlike on-premise legacy NAS, which is stranded on inexpensive but low-powered hardware, an ANQ Cold instance can on-demand, deliver the performance of a production primary tier. 

ANQ Cold allows PACS customers the ability to instantly retrieve cold images from a live filesystem, offering seamless file compatibility with PACS applications. “In pediatrics, we have to keep imaging files until the child turns 21,” says J.D. Whitlock, CIO of 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.” 

Customers can also leverage ANQ cold as a robust, secure copy of critical data as insurance against ransomware attacks. Thanks to Azure’s security, ANQ Cold’s inexpensive data-at-rest rates, affordable data retrieval charges, and ANQ Cold’s cloud-elasticity, customers can expect near-zero data recovery time. This ensures high availability and seamless business continuity during an attack, avoids costly ransoms to bad actors, and keeps ransomware insurance premiums low. 

“With ANQ Cold, we offer enterprises a compelling solution to protect against ransomware,” says Kiran Bhageshpur, CTO at Qumulo. “In combination with our cryptographically signed snapshots, customers can create an instantly accessible “daily golden” copy of their on-premises NAS data, Qumulo or legacy scale-out NAS storage. There is simply no other solution that is as affordable on an on-going basis while also allowing customers to recover to a known good state and resume operations as quickly as with ANQ Cold.” 

ANQ Cold offers a familiar pay-as-you-go pricing model. Customers pay only for the capacity consumed, while enjoying all the traditional enterprise features they would expect of an industry-leading 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. 

https://azure.qumulo.com/pricing