CEO Interview with Bjorn Kolbeck of Quobyte

Bjorn Kolbeck received a PhD in Computer Science from Humboldt University in Berlin. Bjorn had previously worked at HPC centers and at Google. His experience with hyperscale architectures led him to co-found Quobyte in 2013.

Tell us about your company?

Quobyte is scale-out storage, and was designed for massive scalability and extreme availability on hyperscaler principles. It’s designed to handle thousands of nodes using commodity hardware, and the fault resilient architecture is designed to handle failures gracefully. For example, you can lose an entire server,  a rack, or even an entire datacenter, and the cluster will continue to operate with no data loss. At the same time, the software was designed to be simple, it runs completely in user space with no kernel modules or custom drivers or networks, and be  run with very small  teams, which need only basic Linux skills. It’s well suited for semiconductor design, as it excels at managing very large datasets while meeting performance criteria in simulation, design verification, and tape-out among others. The single namespace handles both file and objects, eliminating data silos and facilitates collaboration.

What problems are you solving?

Quobyte addresses a customer’s ever increasing need for performance and capacity, while they face static or even declining budgets, as well as staffing shortages. We do this by being extremely simple to operate, and run on cost-effective commodity hardware. This scalable performance helps maximize resource utilization for compute, GPUs and software licenses. Quobyte can be run on-premises on commodity X86 or ARM servers, in the public cloud, or hybrid cloud environments, depending on the customer’s needs.

What application areas are your strongest?

Our extreme simplicity from initial download to scaling with huge clusters with 100s of petabytes, running on inexpensive commodity hardware as opposed to expensive appliances, and our ability to operate in hybrid environments on premises and in the cloud offers a very compelling value proposition. We are particularly well suited for AI applications, as well as traditional HPC applications in EDA, life sciences, financial services, and oil and gas.

What keeps your customers up at night?

We realize that our customers are demanding more performance to run larger jobs, delivering on tight deadlines, and needing more capacity and better availability with no increase in budget. We satisfy those needs.

What does the competitive landscape look like and how do you differentiate?

The market is dominated by expensive appliances and very complex software. These products are complex to administer and require a large staff, which can be cost prohibitive. We have a completely different approach. Our software is so easy to use and operate that you can download our free edition and be in production in less than an hour. We haven’t seen that from anyone else.

What new features/technology are you working on?

We are continuing to develop our product by making it even easier to use, making large scale data storage even easier to manage as well as adding intelligence to our software and automating optimizations.

How do customers normally engage with your company?

It’s very easy for a customer to engage us. Depending on how you like to learn about new technologies you can download our free edition and install it on your servers or in the cloud, or alternatively you can contact us and get a demo and a customized solution tailored to your use case, environment and needs.

Also Read:

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CEO Interview with Sébastien Dauvé of CEA-Leti

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