Qumulo staff face chop again
Difficulties emerge as customer spend turns down
I understand that Qumulo is laying off more staff following job losses last year. The scale-out distributed file system supplier said it is focused on growth.
Qumulo supplies its Core file system software for hybrid cloud file use cases. Qumulo Hybrid Cloud File Storage is available for AWS and can be bought in the AWS Marketplace. It is also available for GCP in the Google Cloud marketplace. Last month it announced the Azure Native Qumulo Scalable File Service that provides Qumulo’s distributed file system as a native service on Azure. This is available in the Azure marketplace.
Two sources, one close to Qumulo and another at a competing supplier wanting to recruit storage salespeople, said the company was laying people off. One said: “I know of cuts in inside sales, recruiting and marketing. But no engineers or salespeople.”
Qumulo was asked if it had any comment. A spokesperson said: “Qumulo just finished a record year and is well positioned for continued customer adoption and growth. We’re adding new leadership and investing resources against the most important growth initiatives, while also continuing to recruit globally across multiple departments. We’re as enthusiastic as ever to help customers scale their data anywhere.”
The company is, in effect, building its own data fabric to provide a Qumulo environment running across the on-premises and public cloud worlds. It is competing with NetApp ONTAP and also Dell EMC’s PowerScale, originally known as Isilon. WEKA is a file system software competitor in the HPC and high-end enterprise file system space, with VAST Data, supplying its single-tier all-flash Universal Storage, competing in the on-premises market.
Qumulo was started up by ex-Isilon engineers, such as Aaron Passey, its orginal CTO and now senior principal engineer, who was once Isilon’s chief architect. He returned to Qumulo in December, coming from a position at Dropbox. The company raised $125 million in E-round funding in 2020. It went through a layoff round in July last year.
Technical development is ongoing. In December it updated its software to support 265 nodes in a cluster, and added support for new third-party hybrid NVMe platforms. Qumulo said it will add SMB protocol enhancements in the near future.
It is fighting hard to develop its software and maintain progress in its hybrid Qumulo cloud effort against fierce and unrelenting competition from Dell, NetApp, WEKA and VAST. We don’t know how close it is to profitability or its cash burn rate.
The file system supplier space is facing stress. One of the main suppliers, NetApp, is laying off 960 staff in response to a customer spending downturn. It would not be surprising, in such a closely contested market, were other suppliers to be similarly affected by a customer spending slowdown.