Yuzuy is a company dedicated entirely to the development of specialized add-ons for Qumulo. Our exclusive focus is on Qumulo, and we do not partner with any other storage manufacturers. This singular dedication allows us to deeply understand and effectively extend the capabilities of the Qumulo platform.
Qumulo, headquartered in Seattle, develops a cutting-edge file system and a superior platform for both on-premises and cloud environments. Renowned for its exceptional stability and robustness, Qumulo ensures data security and resilience at every level. This includes node-level protection through the fault tolerance of individual drives, cluster-level resilience against node failures, and advanced cluster replication for comprehensive data protection.
What Qumulo Stands For:
- Unprecedented Customer Satisfaction: This commitment is rigorously measured through the Net Promoter Score (NPS), where Qumulo consistently achieves top ratings within the storage industry.
- Direct and Refreshing Support: Qumulo customers benefit from a direct Slack channel with their customer success team, ensuring swift and efficient communication and issue resolution. Working with them is consistently described as quick and refreshing.
- Easy Implementation and Management: Qumulo is designed for simplicity. Setup, expansions, updates, and changes are streamlined and hassle-free, minimizing administrative overhead.
- Elimination of Legacy Problems: Qumulo effectively addresses and resolves common challenges associated with traditional storage systems, such as scaling limitations, time-consuming file system tree walks, delayed analytics, and complex quota management. These issues are inherent to legacy systems but are absent in Qumulo's modern architecture.
- Immediacy and Responsiveness: Qumulo reacts rapidly to administrative changes, such as adjusting quotas, even when the system is operating at full capacity. This responsiveness ensures agility and efficient resource management.
- Super Convergent – API First: Qumulo embraces an "API-first" philosophy, providing a comprehensive and well-documented Application Programming Interface (API) that enables seamless integration with other systems and facilitates automation of various tasks. This underpins its flexibility and adaptability.
- Super Fast and Super Flexible Across Private and Public Clouds: Qumulo delivers exceptional performance and agility, offering consistent functionality and data access across diverse deployment models, including on-premises data centers and public cloud platforms.
- Super Scalable in Terms of Size and Performance: Qumulo is engineered to handle environments with a wide range of file characteristics, including numerous small files, large individual files, massive overall data volumes, and fluctuating performance demands. Its architecture scales linearly, ensuring consistent performance as your data grows.
Qumulo Cloud Data Fabric:
In addition to its robust cluster-level capabilities, Qumulo offers the ☁️Cloud Data Fabric. This innovative technology provides globally consistent, low-latency access to distributed datasets for geographically dispersed workforces, unlocking transformative business capabilities by enabling seamless collaboration and data sharing across locations.
Extending Qumulo's Potential with Specialized Solutions
Yuzuy offers two distinct product lines designed to complement and enhance the core functionalities of Qumulo, addressing critical needs in data protection and management.
Yuzuy Qumulo Bareos Backup Integration:
Qumulo's architecture excels at managing billions of files, regardless of their size. Its scalability allows you to easily expand your infrastructure by adding more nodes, whether on-premises or leveraging cloud resources. While Qumulo nodes provide inherent robustness, a comprehensive backup strategy remains essential for data protection and recovery.
While scalability and performance are often resolved with Qumulo, backing up large file systems with billions of files presents unique challenges. Traditional backup methods can be slow and resource-intensive, especially in such large-scale environments.
This is where Yuzuy steps in. Our Qumulo Bareos Backup Integration provides a solution for performing extremely high-performance file backups that seamlessly integrate into your existing backup strategy.
Understanding Bareos:
Bareos (Backup Archiving Recovery Open Sourced) is a powerful and versatile open-source backup solution designed for cross-network environments. It enables the preservation, archiving, and recovery of data across all major operating systems.
Yuzuy's plugin significantly enhances Bareos' capabilities when used with Qumulo. It can capture file system changes in seconds by leveraging Qumulo's snapshot technology, allowing for rapid and efficient incremental backups.
Bareos offers File Daemons for a wide range of operating systems, including Linux, FreeBSD, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Windows, and macOS. Furthermore, its extensive plugin ecosystem supports the safe backup and restoration of various database servers (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL), LDAP directory services, cloud storage platforms, and virtual machines (VMware, oVirt). Yuzuy proudly adds Qumulo to this comprehensive list of supported technologies.
The Power of Yuzuy's Snapshot-Based Incremental Backups:
The Yuzuy Qumulo Bareos Backup Integration is a specialized plugin for the open-source Bareos backup software. This plugin enables the initiation of extremely fast incremental backups by efficiently comparing Qumulo snapshots.
The Challenge of Backing Up Large File Systems Without Specialized Integration:
Without a dedicated integration like Yuzuy's, the backup software would need to traverse the entire file system, logging every file and directory to identify changes since the last backup. This process, known as a "tree walk," can take days or even weeks for large file systems.
Minutes instead of Days, Hours instead of Weeks
With Bareos and the Yuzuy integration, the backup process can be initiated in a fraction of the time, significantly improving your Recovery Point Objective (RPO). Organizations managing several hundred terabytes of data can start their backups within minutes instead of hours. Larger organizations can reduce the time between initiating the backup process and the actual start of the backup from an entire day to just a few minutes. In particularly massive environments, this timeframe can be reduced from two weeks or more to approximately two hours.
Consider this: without a specific Qumulo integration for the backup software, it could take up to two weeks before the backup even begins. This makes frequent data backups practically impossible, a critical limitation in today's data-driven world. The value of rapid backup initiation cannot be overstated.
Yuzuy and Bareos represent one of the few solutions offering this level of integration, and it is by far the most cost-effective and the only open-source option available for high-performance Qumulo backups.
Yuzuy Software: The Qumulo Security and Data Protection Supertool
Our second product line is the Yuzuy Software suite, a companion solution designed to address several valuable use cases for organizations leveraging Qumulo for their enterprise file storage needs.
Yuzuy's core principle is "Simplicity is Complexity resolved." We believe that true simplicity in software comes from effectively tackling underlying complexities and delivering solutions that are intuitive and easy to use.
This philosophy means that users of Yuzuy software can consistently rely on our solutions to be clearly structured, simple to integrate and operate, and inherently robust and fault-tolerant in their execution. We meticulously design our processes to ensure reliability and ease of use.
The functionalities offered by Yuzuy address critical pain points associated with the management of enterprise file storage environments.
Key Functions of Yuzuy Software:
Failover and Failback Automation
Imagine you are a passenger on an airplane. Looking out the window, you see one of the engines is on fire. You know there is a second engine, and the pilot, having practiced such scenarios countless times, is prepared to land the plane safely.
In this analogy, Qumulo is the airplane, and Yuzuy is the autopilot that ensures a safe return to the ground.
Switching between "Primary" and "Secondary" roles in two Qumulo clusters and redirecting client access to the secondary cluster involves intricate, multi-stage workflows. This process demands absolute robustness, clear and comprehensive documentation, and regular, reliable testing. Yuzuy excels in perfecting this critical process, making it accessible and easily manageable for all administrators, regardless of their experience level.
By implementing Yuzuy, you can significantly enhance the resilience of your IT infrastructure and overcome organizational challenges associated with disaster recovery. It provides a dependable and automated solution for these critical processes, enabling routine testing to ensure that both planned and unplanned failovers function seamlessly, even in the most turbulent operational situations.
Yuzuy offers comprehensive support for SMB (Server Message Block), NFS (Network File System), and SMB via DFS-N (Distributed File System Namespace), enabling complete failover or failback operations with a single click or a simple API call.
And by "complete," we truly mean complete. Yuzuy supports all failover scenarios between unidirectionally and bidirectionally replicating (Cross-Replication) clusters, providing unparalleled flexibility and control.
Furthermore, if you are in a failover state and new replications are generated between the two clusters, Yuzuy intelligently prompts you during the failback process to specify which cluster should now be the primary location for each directory. This granular control ensures data integrity and operational clarity.
Yuzuy's Failover and Failback Automation offers the most advanced option available for Qumulo environments by far. The alternatives available to organizations for managing failover and failback between Qumulo clusters include manual scripting (which we will discuss in more detail after explaining the "Synchronization" function) and a software alternative from a vendor not specialized in Qumulo, which cannot match Yuzuy's feature set and process reliability.
We will first describe the "Synchronization" function and then illustrate why combining Qumulo replication with Yuzuy elevates your disaster recovery and process reliability to a new level.
Object Synchronization:
Imagine you and your team are working in a large open-plan office. Suddenly, due to an emergency, the area needs to be evacuated. There is a secure room within the building that offers refuge in such situations. Yuzuy ensures that this secure room not only has doors and that you can actually access it, but also that once inside, everyone finds their familiar workspace, complete with their usual tools and setup, allowing them to immediately continue their work without disruption.
Qumulo's Continuous Replication operates at the directory level, requiring the manual creation of corresponding shares, exports, quotas, share options, access rules, and permissions on the replication target to ensure client access after a failover. Yuzuy Synchronization automates this critical process by continuously syncing NFS exports, SMB shares, share options, access rules and quotas between two or more clusters, ensuring near real-time consistency. Yuzuy intelligently identifies the configuration components associated with replicated directories, catalogs any changes occurring on the secondary system, and replicates them back to the primary cluster even during a failover event.
Changes to these configuration objects often occur daily, either through manual configuration adjustments by administrators or through automated processes and systems.
If these objects are unavailable or outdated on the replication target, it can lead to severe consequences.
For example, if the directories and their files have been successfully replicated, but the share configurations that grant accessing clients the necessary permissions are missing, the data will be present after a failover, but access will be impossible, rendering the replicated data unusable.
Similarly, if quotas are not configured on the replication target, it can result in uncontrolled storage consumption by clients, potentially leading to unexpected costs, especially in organizations with internal tenants or chargeback models.
If quotas on the replication target are set lower than on the source system, it can cause work interruptions for clients and disrupt services that are unexpectedly prevented from writing data, leading to outages and Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations.
If share options, such as Access Based Enumeration (ABE), are not configured correctly on the replication target, accessing clients may be able to see information about files and directories they do not have permission to access, potentially raising security and compliance concerns.
Finally, if required encryption settings are not synchronized, it can inadvertently lead to unencrypted data traffic, exposing sensitive information.
While it is theoretically possible to manually maintain these configuration objects, in practice, it is a highly error-prone and time-consuming task, especially in dynamic enterprise environments.
Implementing a synchronization solution through scripting is also a possibility in principle. However, besides the inherent complexity that scripting introduces, it often falls short, particularly when dealing with planned or unplanned failover scenarios.
Yuzuy's Object Synchronization is fully failover and failback aware. It operates seamlessly in any situation, regardless of whether two or more clusters are involved, whether they are replicating unidirectionally or bidirectionally, or whether they are in a normal operating state or a failover state. Even when in a failover state and the original primary cluster is unavailable, Yuzuy diligently catalogs changes to the object configurations of directories that were originally located on the primary cluster and automatically applies these changes back once the primary cluster comes back online.
The process is straightforward: you simply select the object types you want to synchronize between the clusters and click "Start." An initial preview provides a clear overview of the objects that will be created during the initial synchronization, ensuring transparency and control from the outset.
Subsequently, all relevant configuration objects associated with directories that are part of a replication relationship are automatically synchronized, with the direction of the replication defining the direction of the synchronization.
Scripting as an Alternative?
Now that we have a clear understanding of the complex interplay between failover and synchronization, let's revisit the idea of relying on scripting for these critical tasks. It becomes evident that achieving the same level of seamless integration and reliability through scripting alone is practically impossible.
While Qumulo's QQ-CLI and API offer the ability to script individual functions relatively easily, which we greatly appreciate and even leverage within Yuzuy, there are several key aspects that can only be effectively addressed with Yuzuy's integrated approach:
- Independence from Individual Knowledge: We've all encountered critical scripts that were developed and maintained by individuals who are no longer with the organization, making updates and troubleshooting a significant challenge. Yuzuy provides a standardized and supported solution, eliminating this dependency.
- Seamless Integration Between Failover/Failback Events and Synchronization: Yuzuy intelligently manages the relationship between failover and failback events and the synchronization process, including the crucial task of cataloging configuration changes during a failover scenario to ensure proper restoration upon failback.
- Reduced Maintenance Overhead: Unlike custom scripts that require ongoing maintenance and updates to adapt to system changes, Yuzuy is a commercially supported software solution, relieving your team from this burden.
- "Failover Readiness" at All Times: With Yuzuy, you can have confidence that your failover capabilities are consistently ready and functional, without the need for constant manual checks and script verification.
- Simplified Disaster Recovery Operations: In high-pressure disaster situations, Yuzuy allows you to initiate failover with a single click, eliminating the stress and potential errors associated with manually executing complex scripts.
- Confidence in Regular Disaster Recovery Testing: Yuzuy's ease of use encourages frequent testing of your disaster recovery procedures, ensuring that your team is prepared and your recovery plans are effective.
- Support for Complex Multi-Cluster Configurations: Yuzuy is designed to handle intricate configurations involving more than two Qumulo clusters, providing consistent and reliable failover and synchronization across your entire environment.
Anti-Virus Integration:
Similar to the challenges encountered with backup in large file system environments, integrating anti-virus solutions also presents unique complexities.
On your laptop or a virtual server, an anti-virus agent typically runs deeply integrated with the operating system, scanning modified files and performing a multitude of other security functions common in modern endpoint protection solutions.
However, the situation on a Qumulo storage cluster is fundamentally different.
For well-founded reasons related to system stability and performance, Qumulo does not permit the direct installation of anti-virus software on its nodes. This clear separation of storage services from compute-intensive security processes is a key factor in Qumulo's renowned robustness and performance.
In many scenarios, we can assume that accessing clients will scan the files they interact with for malware. However, this is not always the case. Several factors can contribute to this:
- Access Performance: Running on-access scans on client systems can introduce latency and impact application performance, leading users to disable or bypass these scans.
- Specialized Applications: Certain specialized applications may not be compatible with or allow the installation of traditional anti-virus software.
- Incomplete Client Configuration: Not all client systems may be properly configured with up-to-date anti-virus protection.
- Lack of Centralized Control: As a storage administrator, you have limited or no direct control over the security posture of all accessing client systems, yet you remain responsible for ensuring the integrity of the data stored on your Qumulo cluster.
Given these challenges, what level of protection is truly necessary at the file system level?
As a storage administrator, your key objectives likely include:
- Ensuring that every file modification is inspected by a virus scanner.
- Minimizing negative impact on storage performance.
- Preventing the introduction of new points of failure or operational complexities.
- Avoiding on-access scanning on the storage itself to prevent latency for accessing clients.
- Utilizing a reputable and proven anti-virus scanning engine.
- Implementing a solution that can scale with your storage infrastructure.
Yuzuy's Anti-Virus Integration is specifically designed to address all of these requirements effectively.
Let's first examine the architecture and then the operational principles of our AV integration.
The solution comprises the Yuzuy Software appliance (the same platform that provides failover and synchronization capabilities) and an arbitrary number of dedicated scan servers. These scan servers run a lightweight Yuzuy Protection Client and your chosen anti-virus software.
The core Yuzuy Software itself is deployed as a virtual appliance within your data center or cloud environment.
Qumulo streams real-time information about all file and directory modifications to the Yuzuy Software appliance.
Yuzuy then intelligently forwards the details of the files that need to be scanned to the designated scan servers, which perform the actual virus scanning using your configured anti-virus engine.
If malicious code is detected and actions are required (such as quarantining or deleting infected files), these actions are executed by the AV client on the scan server based on its configured policies, logging mechanisms, SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) integrations, etc.
To clarify:
- Yuzuy is not a virus scanner itself; rather, it integrates seamlessly with your existing, reputable anti-virus solutions, leveraging their proven detection capabilities.
- Yuzuy does not provide "real-time protection" in the traditional sense of scanning every file access. Instead, it offers a technically sophisticated solution for scanning files shortly after a write operation by a client is completed, minimizing the time gap while avoiding the performance overhead of on-access scanning.
- The scanning process does not occur on the central Yuzuy Software appliance, which is optimized for orchestration and management. Instead, the resource-intensive scanning tasks are offloaded to dedicated, scalable scan servers.
The number of scan servers you deploy is determined by your specific performance requirements. This is primarily influenced by the rate of file changes on your Qumulo storage, the size and type of files being modified, and the CPU resources available on your scan servers. Yuzuy's architecture allows you to scale your scanning capacity independently of your storage capacity.
The management of all scan servers is centralized through the Yuzuy Software interface. Communication between the scan servers and the Yuzuy appliance is securely encrypted and adheres to the principle of least privilege, ensuring that each component only has the necessary permissions to perform its designated tasks.
You have granular control over which directories are protected by the anti-virus integration and can assign specific scan servers to monitor particular Qumulo clusters, allowing for optimized resource allocation and tailored security policies.
Cloud Data Fabric:
Yuzuy's AV integration is fully compatible with Qumulo's Cloud Data Fabric. A single Yuzuy instance deployed at the hub cluster is all that is required to extend comprehensive anti-virus protection across your entire globally distributed Qumulo environment. This underscores our commitment to the principle: Simplicity is Complexity resolved.
Ransomware:
What about ransomware? Is a simple virus scan sufficient, or do I need more advanced techniques like sandboxing, EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response), or XDR (Extended Detection and Response)?
In this context, we are discussing behavior-based analysis, which inherently needs to occur on the system executing a file. From a storage perspective, behavior-based analysis of file execution is outside our domain.
When it comes to ransomware protection at the storage level, our strongest recommendation is to leverage the exceptional capabilities offered by: a) Snapshots and b) Backup. These are your most reliable defenses against data loss due to ransomware attacks.
- Immutable snapshots provide space-efficient, point-in-time protection at any level of your file system.
- Snapshots can be cryptographically locked, preventing premature or malicious deletion, ensuring their availability for recovery even if administrative accounts are compromised.
- Replicating data between sites or to/from the cloud establishes a cascading multi-site topology, providing redundancy and recovery options in case one location is affected by an attack.
- On-demand, rapid restorability from secondary and tertiary copies stored in the cloud offers agility and minimizes downtime during recovery.
In contrast, behavior-based detection of encryption processes is merely an attempt to identify malicious activity. While valuable at the endpoint, it does not negate the fundamental need for reliable data recovery mechanisms at the storage level. Secure snapshots are indispensable for this purpose. In most environments, a robust backup strategy provides an additional and crucial layer of protection.
Backups offer a wider range of possibilities, allowing you to secure historical data with an air gap on various media types, isolating it from the primary environment and potential attack vectors. As previously mentioned, Yuzuy, in conjunction with Bareos, provides an excellent and cost-effective solution specifically tailored for Qumulo, enabling you to create backups on various targets, including S3 cloud storage or physical tape libraries.
Characteristics of Yuzuy:
Yuzuy is delivered as a virtual appliance, designed for easy deployment within your data center or cloud infrastructure. Installation and initial configuration are typically completed in just minutes.
The software features intuitive in-place upgrades accessible through the user interface, simplifying ongoing maintenance. Yuzuy seamlessly integrates with cross-replicating Qumulo clusters and can be readily incorporated into your existing monitoring or IT Service Management (ITMS) systems via its comprehensive REST API.
Yuzuy implements internal Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) based on a granular role model, allowing you to define precise permissions for different administrators. Furthermore, it can be seamlessly integrated with LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) and Active Directory, enabling centralized user management through your existing directory services.
Licensing:
Yuzuy Software is offered as an annual software subscription, with licensing based on the total amount of Qumulo-licensed terabytes managed across all clusters by Yuzuy. This subscription includes access to all features, a dedicated implementation workshop to ensure a smooth onboarding process, comprehensive support services, and all future functionalities released during the subscription period for eligible customers. Importantly, the number of AV scan servers you deploy is unlimited, and customers are permitted to run any number of Yuzuy instances within their licensed environment.
The Yuzuy Qumulo Bareos Backup Integration is licensed based on the size of a full backup. This license includes comprehensive support for the integration itself. Optionally, customers can also purchase a subscription and support directly for the underlying Bareos backup software. Similarly, implementation services and consulting for the backup integration and Bareos can be acquired as needed. For your convenience, the entire package, including the Yuzuy integration and optional Bareos components and services, can be purchased directly through Yuzuy.
Support:
Qumulo's Customer Success program, Qumulo Care, is redefining the standards for customer support in the storage industry. Experience superior customer service and discover firsthand why Qumulo customers consistently award them the highest Net Promoter Scores (NPS) in the storage market.
Qumulo Care pairs you with a dedicated Customer Success Manager (CSM) whose primary goal is to ensure you are maximizing the value of your Qumulo investment. Should you have any questions or encounter any issues, you can reach out via your direct Slack channel, email, or phone to receive the timely and expert assistance you need.
Qumulo’s Customer Success Engineers (CSEs) are not just reading from a script; they possess deep technical expertise in file storage systems and a comprehensive understanding of associated workflows and applications. They are responsive, fully invested in your success, and consistently reliable.
Organizations utilizing both Qumulo and Yuzuy can typically access support for both solutions through their company-specific Slack channel, streamlining communication and issue resolution, unless an alternative method is preferred. Additionally, customers always have access to the latest software versions and comprehensive documentation via my.yuzuy.com.
Collaboration with Yuzuy:
Qumulo systems can be procured by end customers through a network of trusted partners. Available hardware platforms include industry-leading vendors such as Arrow, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Supermicro, providing flexibility and choice in infrastructure deployment.
Yuzuy collaborates closely with partners, distributors, and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) to ensure that organizations can obtain a complete and integrated solution from a single, reliable source, simplifying the procurement and deployment process.
Empowering Your Qumulo Investment with Yuzuy
In today's rapidly evolving data landscape, organizations require storage solutions that are not only high-performing and scalable but also resilient, secure, and easy to manage. Qumulo provides a powerful foundation, and Yuzuy's specialized add-ons are engineered to further enhance these critical aspects, addressing key challenges in data protection, availability, and security.
Our aim is to provide you with the knowledge and solutions necessary to optimize your Qumulo environment. We understand that investing in data storage infrastructure is a significant decision, involving technical, organizational, and compliance considerations. Yuzuy is designed to empower all stakeholders involved in this process, offering clarity, simplifying complexity, and ultimately delivering peace of mind.
Whether you are grappling with the intricacies of disaster recovery, the complexities of ensuring data availability across distributed environments, or the critical need for robust anti-virus protection in high-performance file systems, Yuzuy offers targeted and effective solutions. Our deep specialization in Qumulo allows us to develop integrations that are tightly aligned with its architecture, providing superior performance, reliability, and ease of use compared to generic or less focused alternatives.
We invite you to explore how Yuzuy can specifically address your organization's unique needs and challenges. Our team is ready to engage in a consultative discussion, providing further insights into our solutions and demonstrating the tangible benefits they can bring to your Qumulo deployment.
Take the Next Step
Discover how Yuzuy can help you:
- Enhance data protection with high-performance, snapshot-integrated backups.
- Automate failover and failback processes for business continuity and minimize downtime.
- Ensure data consistency across replicated environments with intelligent object synchronization.
- Integrate robust anti-virus scanning without impacting storage performance.
- Simplify the management of your mission-critical file storage infrastructure.
We look forward to partnering with you on your journey to optimal data management with Qumulo and Yuzuy.