Qumulo at Cloud Field Day 23: DR Without the Drama

I’ve been in this industry long enough to have seen disaster recovery run the full spectrum—from fire drills that barely worked to full-on game changers. And at Cloud Field Day 23, Qumulo laid out a vision for business continuity that might just live up to the hype. Not because it’s flashy, but because it’s practical. DR that works without being the most expensive line item in your budget? That got my attention.

Let’s break it down.

No More Stretching the Truth About Stretch Clusters

Most of us have been sold the dream of active-active systems with full failover and zero downtime. And then reality sets in. You either pay double to stand up a hot standby that sits idle most of the year—or you roll the dice and hope your last backup isn’t too stale when it counts.

Qumulo’s take? Don’t replicate everything twice. Instead, park your data in cold cloud storage like Glacier Instant Retrieval or Azure Blob Cold, where the cost per terabyte actually makes CFOs smile. Then, scale up compute on demand only when you need it. We’re talking cold to hot in under five minutes—no data rehydration, no DNS voodoo, no long restore windows.

Qumulo Instant Hot DR

And here’s where it gets really interesting: Qumulo isn’t just minimizing costs—they’re actively engineering out inefficiencies. One customer faced $800,000 in projected API charges moving medical images into a vendor-neutral archive. Qumulo helped them reduce that to just $180. The magic wasn’t in waving away the cost—it came from bin-packing files to minimize object write operations and optimizing how data interacted with the storage backend.

On top of that, Qumulo’s neural cache plays a significant role in controlling read-heavy workloads. By maintaining 92–98% read cache hit rates and adapting caching strategies based on usage patterns, file types, and directory behavior, they slash repeat API calls that would otherwise nickel-and-dime you into oblivion. Their global fleet averages less than 1% of monthly cost from API charges, compared to 15–20% that’s typical for cloud object storage.

Now, are those numbers a best-case scenario? Almost certainly. And I’m always skeptical of dramatic cost-saving claims until I can get hands-on and validate them in a real environment. But what’s undeniable is that Qumulo is hyper-optimizing their platform not just for performance, but to respect the economics of running file workloads in the cloud. That’s more than most vendors even try to do.

Real-Time DR You Can Actually Test (And Should)

One line from the presentation stuck with me: “We’ve never tested our DR because if I take down production to do it, that’s a resume-generating event.” If you’ve worked in ops, you’ve heard this. Or maybe you’ve said it.

Qumulo’s approach flips the model. Their system continuously replicates data block-by-block between your on-prem caching layer and a cloud-native backend. The cache stays local for performance, but the cloud holds the authoritative copy. That means you can spin down your on-prem environment, move employees to another site—or just hand them a fully capable Asus NUC—and keep working like nothing happened.

During the demo, they showed a failover that was basically “stop using this SMB share, start using this one.” Same data, same structure, same IP. Even the mount point didn’t change. No rehydration, no scrambling to resync state. It just worked.

Data Fabric That’s More Than a Buzzword

Every vendor talks about their data fabric. Qumulo actually showed one.

They connected an on-prem environment to a cloud-native Qumulo instance using a “data portal”—think block-level streaming replication, not dumb file copies. Clients didn’t have to know the cloud existed. Then they moved data, edited a file, failed over, failed back, and showed full consistency end to end. And if you’re thinking, “What about edge or third-party access?”—yep, that’s built in too. They demoed extending read-write access to an external partner with full revocation and audit.

Even better, this wasn’t just DR—it was a multi-cloud-ready setup with file, object, and cloud compute playing nice together. AWS, Azure, GCP—pick your flavor. The system doesn’t care.

Where the Data Lives (And Who Uses It)

In the CEO’s opening segment, we got a better sense of just who’s using Qumulo. Turns out, it’s everyone from entertainment studios rendering animated characters your kids know by name, to healthcare researchers storing medical imaging and genomic datasets. The claim that “we’re storing the cure for cancer on a Qumulo system” might sound dramatic—but they meant it literally, with NIH and NSF grant recipients relying on their storage to keep research data accessible and verifiable.

Want to know how real-time image processing supports public safety? Qumulo powers storage for real-time crime centers in major U.S. cities. They even shared a story about a high-profile presidential visit requiring instantaneous video ingest, analysis, and secure access for multiple agencies, including those that couldn’t legally use facial recognition software—while others could. Same data, different access paths, strict consistency guaranteed.

They’re also serving defense agencies working with UAS/UAV video data and edge AI, and municipal governments managing CAD/GIS datasets for public works. One customer runs a single microscope generating 750 terabytes per week, streaming it to an AI cluster in Texas for medical research. That’s the scale we’re talking about.

Final Take

This wasn’t a pitch about replacing your on-prem hardware with another box. It was a strategy shift: DR that’s built into your primary system, not bolted on. Qumulo’s demo didn’t just show high availability—it showed recoverability that feels like high availability. And it did it with less infrastructure, less manual effort, and fewer “please don’t crash” prayers.

It’s business continuity without the drama. And frankly, it’s pretty cool.

Qumulo CFD23 Presenters