Qumulo Announces Expanded Collaboration with Microsoft to Deliver Cloud-Native Storage Relief for the Enterprise Hardware Crisis

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Qumulo, the Accelerated Data company, today announced an expanded collaboration with Microsoft. Unveiled in conjunction with the Microsoft Build developer conference, this integration introduces advanced data services designed to provide immediate relief for organizations caught in the global hardware supply chain crisis.

Bypassing the Silicon Squeeze with Azure Native Qumulo

As hyperscalers absorb the vast majority of global DRAM and NVMe production, enterprise customers face a "Silicon Squeeze," marked by surging hardware prices and lead times stretching from months to quarters. This hardware crisis is increasingly driving organizations to the cloud to find fast, non-disruptive ways to access capacity.

"In a world where advanced components are scarce, and pricing curves have turned vertical, enterprises face a stark choice: cling to purist architectures built for yesterday's component abundance, or design for flexibility in a market defined by constraint," said Douglas Gourlay, CEO of Qumulo. "In periods of volatility, flexibility is strategy. Azure Native Qumulo provides a seamless cloud bridge, allowing organizations to leverage Microsoft Azure as a cost-effective storage solution without re-platforming their applications."

Azure Native Qumulo (ANQ), along with Qumulo’s Cloud Data Fabric, offers a non-disruptive, cost-reducing bridge to the cloud that enables customers to burst capacity to Microsoft Azure without migrating applications or clients. Customers retain their familiar enterprise NAS capabilities, completely avoiding the capital expense, constraints, and delays of waiting for on-premises hardware, while gaining immediate relief from unlimited cloud capacity in a single hybrid solution. This approach not only addresses supply chain disruption but also places enterprise data in close proximity to cloud AI services for faster insights and unlocking new AI-driven workflows without retooling existing environments. What used to take months to years of migration efforts can be achieved in minutes.

Seamless Migration with Qumulo SLURP

To ensure organizations can escape legacy hardware constraints immediately, Qumulo is leveraging its Simple Lightweight Universal Replication Program (SLURP) to accelerate the migration of massive unstructured datasets from legacy NAS file systems directly to Azure Native Qumulo. Using high-performance parallel data transfer and snapshot-based synchronization, SLURP minimizes migration windows with no downtime, preserving all metadata and permissions so customers can transition to the cloud quickly and safely without disrupting business-critical applications.

Zero-Copy AI Pipelines

Furthermore, ANQ delivers a zero-copy architecture in the cloud that natively integrates with Microsoft’s premier AI tools, including Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft Fabric, and Copilot. Data remains in place on ANQ while being instantly accessible to Microsoft’s AI services, completely eliminating the need to duplicate or stage massive datasets, accelerating time-to-insight, and keeping expensive GPU resources fully utilized.

"Microsoft is committed to empowering enterprises with the most advanced cloud and AI capabilities available," said Aung Oo, Vice President, Product Management - Azure Storage at Microsoft. "By deepening our collaboration with Qumulo through our latest service integrations, we are giving customers a highly performant, cost-effective path to migrate their most demanding file workloads to Microsoft Azure. Together, we are addressing the friction of distributed data silos so organizations can fully leverage Microsoft Foundry and Microsoft Fabric to accelerate their innovation."

Automated Cost Optimization with Azure Smart Tiering

This deepened collaboration also introduces powerful new service integrations. Qumulo now integrates with Azure Blob's smart tiering, automatically moving data between hot, cool, and cold access tiers based on real-time usage patterns. This provides zero-touch cost optimization with no retrieval penalties, no early delete costs, and low API fees.

“Smart Tier represents a major step forward in simplifying how enterprises optimize storage in the cloud,” said Brandon Whitelaw, SVP and Head of Product at Qumulo. “The ability to automate tiering while maintaining resilience and predictable economics is highly complementary to Qumulo’s data services on Azure. Together with Microsoft, we’re enabling customers to modernize file workloads on Azure while reducing operational complexity and improving long-term cost efficiency."

Real-Time Ransomware Defense for ANQ

The recently announced Qumulo NeuralProtect is available first on ANQ. Qumulo NeuralProtect delivers built-in, real-time ransomware and malware protection directly at the ANQ storage layer by inspecting every file at the point of write, stopping attacks before enterprise data is encrypted, corrupted, or lost. Unlike backup, endpoint, or entropy-based solutions that react after an attack, NeuralProtect detects both known and zero-day threats, instantly isolates malicious activity, creates defensive snapshots, and enables rapid recovery - all embedded natively in ANQ.

To learn more about Azure Native Qumulo and these new integrations, visit Qumulo at www.qumulo.com.

About Qumulo

Qumulo is the only seven-time Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed File and Object Storage and the foremost provider of cloud data platforms. With exabytes under management and more than 1,000 production customers, Qumulo is trusted by Fortune 500 companies and global enterprises to manage, store, curate, and protect their data, unlocking new possibilities and driving innovation across diverse industries.