In a world where technological advancements are rapidly reshaping our lives, it’s not uncommon to encounter groundbreaking innovations that leave us awestruck. From artificial intelligence and virtual reality to renewable energy and autonomous vehicles, the possibilities seem endless. However, with every groundbreaking invention comes a healthy dose of skepticism. After all, history has taught us to be cautious when faced with new technologies that appear too good to be true.

Many technological advancements, now part of the fabric of our work and home lives, were initially greeted with skepticism.

Personal computers were once considered gadgets or toys with limited practical applications. Having a computer in every home or office was not immediately perceived as necessary or beneficial. Over time, as PCs became more user-friendly, affordable, and versatile, these negative perceptions diminished. The advent of graphical user interfaces, the growth of software libraries, and the expansion of the internet helped address these concerns and transformed PCs into indispensable tools for work, education, communication, and entertainment.

Skepticism is a good thing. It prompts us to question the validity, feasibility, and potential drawbacks of seemingly miraculous inventions and encourages critical thinking, preventing us from falling prey to exaggerated claims or unrealistic expectations. Skepticism also drives the need for rigorous testing, evaluation, and verification, ensuring that technologies are safe, reliable, and beneficial. By approaching new technologies with a healthy dose of skepticism, we can foster responsible innovation, mitigate risks, and ultimately build a future where advancements are both transformational and trustworthy. However, skepticism can also have drawbacks when taken to an extreme. It can hinder progress, lead to missed opportunities, slow down innovation, prolong doubt, and stifle creativity.

At WEKA, we are often greeted with skepticism when we talk with potential customers about the tremendous cost savings and performance gains the WEKA® Data Platform can help them to achieve versus their legacy data architectures, or when we tell them they can save up to 65% on their cloud storage with a 7x performance improvement. Their existing outlook on data infrastructure, grounded in solutions not designed to take maximum advantage of modern technology, doesn’t always provide a foundation for comprehending the revolutionary concepts of the WEKA architecture.

Just a few weeks ago, we were talking to a room full of PhDs who couldn’t believe the WEKA platform could meet their performance needs without throwing an excessive amount of expensive hardware at the problem. Overcoming these challenges requires technical deep dives, multiple conversations, and proof of concept deployments, often resulting in delayed ‘aha’ moments when customers see the benefits of the WEKA Data Platform in action.

To help alleviate any natural skepticism or concerns for customers adopting a new approach with WEKA and to minimize perceived risks, we are introducing two new guarantees to mitigate their perceived risks about the performance, value, and cost savings WEKA can drive in the cloud and on-premises.

The WEKA 1/2 Price Guarantee

Many organizations are rightly concerned about getting the affordable performance they need to run next-generation workloads like AI/ML, and HPC in the cloud. In many cases, they have had to overprovision storage to meet the unique performance requirements of a given workload. Others find they can scale up to meet peak demand or respond to a short-term request, only to realize they are now stuck paying for capacity they won’t use for the rest of the year.

This can lead to organizations overspending on cloud storage because legacy solutions aren’t suited for the scale of the cloud, and cloud-native solutions are not designed for high-performance workloads. The fear of spiraling costs in the cloud has created skepticism that “impossible” performance-intensive workloads – can’t be affordably run in the cloud.

The design philosophy behind the cloud-native WEKA Data Platform was to create a single architecture that runs on-premises or in the public cloud with the performance of all-flash arrays, the simplicity and feature set of network-attached storage (NAS), and the scalability and economics of the cloud. This approach delivers on-premises performance in the cloud at a much lower cost.

We’re so confident in the WEKA platform’s revolutionary approach that we will stand behind it with a guarantee. We guarantee we can save you 50% on your current cloud storage solution (up to 1 PB of data) with zero impact on performance, or we will make up the difference out of our pocket (see the details below).

The WEKA 2X Performance Guarantee

Another area of skepticism is the WEKA Data Platform’s performance. It can deliver orders of magnitude greater performance than customers are used to on-premises, no matter the workload – be it requiring high I/O, low latency, or high bandwidth. We also excel at handling lots (millions) of small files and mixed workloads – all with zero tuning.

These performance levels are unattainable by similarly-sized legacy Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliances but made possible with WEKA’s modern NVMe‐optimized, distributed data architecture.

We are so confident in the revolutionary performance gains the WEKA Data Platform can deliver, that we guarantee it. If it can’t deliver twice the performance (or more) of a comparable-sized NAS storage appliance, we will pay to make up the difference.

Let Us Prove It to You

Sometimes, our biases and past experiences can make us think that certain things are too good to be true. We’ve all had positive experiences or preconceived notions that shape our expectations and can make us believe that something is too fantastical to be real. But here’s the thing – reality doesn’t always match up with our past biases. New technology can enable capabilities that previously seemed unfathomable. Think about what we take for granted today: the Internet, self-driving cars, 3D printers, and generative AI, аll of these were greeted with a healthy dose of skepticism before we looked harder and saw their value.

Let us dispel your skepticism about the WEKA Data Platform. Whether your goal is to affordably run impossible workloads in the cloud or get the necessary performance to run next-generation workloads on-premises, our new WEKA Guarantees offer you the reassurance you need to adopt new data architecture. They are our promise that you will get the promised outcome, or we will correct it at our expense.

While skepticism is valuable in evaluating new technologies, striking a balance is important to foster responsible innovation and ensure their benefits are quickly realized while mitigating risks. For more details about our two skepticism-eliminating guarantees:

Explore Our New WEKA Guarantees