Hybrid Storage Isn’t What You Think
Quobyte runs NVMe and HDD inside a single software-defined system, with placement policies that put every piece of data on the medium that fits it best – automatically and transparently. Flash performance where it matters, disk economics everywhere else.
Most “hybrid” storage is really two separate systems, an all-flash primary and a disk-based archive, joined by an API that has to move data back and forth every time access patterns change. Quobyte is built differently – NVMe and HDD operate side by side inside one architecture, with placement governed by policy and applied automatically. No boundary to cross, no archive to wait on.
Find Your Sweet Spot
Drag the slider to mix flash and disk and watch performance and cost shift in real time. The flash-to-disk ratio doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing for the economics to work in your favor.
PERFORMANCE
COST REDUCTION
Quobyte’s Policy Engine in Action
One system, not two products glued together
Most hybrid storage is just two systems: flash for hot data, disk for cold, stitched together with an API that constantly moves data – adding latency, overhead, and hidden engineering cost.
Quobyte treats NVMe and HDD as equal participants in the same architecture, with placement governed by policy and carried out by the system, automatically and transparently.
Performance where it counts
NVMe handles the workloads that demand high performance: low-latency applications, active AI training, KV cache storage for inference, and anything else where storage speed directly shapes the outcome.
Nothing else has to live on flash just to keep up, because cold data, backups, archives, and sequential workloads sit on disk where they belong at a fraction of the cost.
Savings that scale with your capacity
Flash is expensive, and most of your data doesn’t deserve it. Cold data, archives, workloads nobody is watching in real time, that’s what disk is for, at a fraction of the cost. The bigger your footprint, the more that difference matters.
Need more performance later? Add flash. Need more capacity? Add disk. Both already live inside the same system, so neither decision turns into a migration project.
Zero operational overhead
Your team doesn’t manage tiers here, because the system manages them. Placement runs on the policies you set once, and the only lever you ever need to touch is the policy itself.
Data movement between flash and disk is transparent to users and applications. Anything you ask for is instantly available on whichever tier holds it, with none of the waiting that comes from paging cold data back from an S3 archive.
Resources
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You’re being sold a false choice on storage
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How Zoox scaled AI training to 30+ PB
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Whitepaper: How hybrid storage actually works
Frequently Asked Questions
Most vendors sell hybrid as two separate systems joined by an API, with cold data living on a disk-based archive that has to be paged back when accessed. Quobyte runs flash and disk inside one system, with placement governed by policy and applied automatically. The architecture was built this way from the start, not assembled from two products after the fact.
You define placement policies based on workload, data type, or access pattern. The system applies them automatically, writing each piece of data to the right medium from the start and moving it later only if policy says it should. The placement is transparent to users and applications, and there’s no tiering console for your team to manage.
Hot data stays on flash regardless of how much HDD capacity you add for cold data, so adding a modest share of HDD to your configuration typically has minimal impact on workload performance while meaningfully reducing cost. The slider above shows the full curve.
No. NVMe and HDD can live in the same cluster, managed by the same software and accessed through the same interface. There are no separate tiers to provision, monitor, or scale.
Data movement is transparent to users and applications. Anything you ask for is instantly available on whichever tier holds it, with none of the waiting that comes from paging cold data back from an S3 archive.
Yes. You can begin with all-flash or all-disk and add the other medium when your needs evolve. The architecture supports both from the start, so adding capacity to either side doesn’t require a re-platforming exercise.
Workloads continue running. Quobyte supports non-disruptive upgrades, so you can add or remove hardware without downtime, and placement policies take effect without interrupting active applications.
Yes. Quobyte runs on commodity x86 or ARM hardware and supports standard networking including Ethernet and InfiniBand. No specialized appliances required.
Hardware cost scales down with the HDD portion of your deployment. The more capacity that lives on disk, the lower the cost. The slider above shows the full curve.
Yes. Zoox and Siemens Healthineers both run Quobyte at scale. Their case studies are linked above, and our team can walk you through additional references on request.
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