Qumulo, the provider of Qumulo File Fabric (QF2) universal scalable file system software, today announced the availability of QF2 on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers. Qumulo software also runs on hardware the vendor sources, on HPE hardware, in the public cloud and can be found in the AWS marketplace.

The latest hardware announcement is an example of the vendor’s philosophy of providing customers with options.

Qumulo’s Peter Zaballos

“Our approach is to give the market choice,” Peter Zaballos, chief marketing officer at Qumulo, told us. “This is the big thrust of our business model. You can expect us to be announcing other OEMs down the road.”

Pete Godman and Neal Fachan, company founders, launched Qumulo based on their observations of the storage market: Enterprise collaboration across geographies was growing rapidly, companies faced managing an expanding data footprint totaling billions of files (large and small), public and hybrid cloud was going to become mainstream and infrastructure was being delivered as software.

So, the company built a file storage system (software) platform that could run in the data center on a variety of hardware, and the same file system could run natively in the public cloud.

“The builders of data centers have long known that there are advantages and disadvantages that accompany standardization on a single hardware platform,” said Godman. “On the one hand, it’s much easier to manage just one type of hardware. On the other hand, this standardization can mean getting locked into legacy storage technologies,” said Godman. “Qumulo’s support for Dell brings new choice in scale out NAS to those who want a low complexity hardware environment.”

What this means for Qumulo partners — the vendor is a partner-led company — is that they can have a discussion with their customers about QF2, whether they’ve standardized on a single vendor’s hardware or they mix and match hardware from multiple vendors.

“As a result of today’s announcement, a customer can now provision their private cloud with Dell hardware they want and with our software,” Zaballos said.

The vendor launched a new partner program earlier this year when it appointed Leonard Iventosch, as chief channel evangelist. The vendor goes to market, globally, with its own partners as well as those from HPE and reports having more than 100 partners in its network.

The six-year-old company announced in June that it raised $93 million in Series D funding. The latest round of funding secures the vendor’s plans for continued expansion, accelerated product capability and long-term sustainability, company CEO Bill Richter noted at the time.

Qumulo also announced, in June, that it was redefining archive file storage,in the cloud era with the release of Qumulo Nearline Archive Series. The new offer delivers QF2 on cloud data center standard hardware.