The solution’s hybrid cloud capabilities accelerate business outcomes and improves productivity.
CAMPBELL, Calif. – February 2, 2021 – WekaIO™ (Weka), today announced the Limitless Data Platform—a simple, fast, and scalable platform for running modern enterprise workloads. Weka is the fastest-growing data platform for modern enterprise workloads such as artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), life sciences research, and high-performance data analytics (HPDA).
Enterprises are experiencing an explosive growth of unstructured data. According to IDC projections, 80 percent of worldwide data will be unstructured by 20251 and is growing at a rate of 55-65 percent each year2. Enterprises that harness the power of their data can drive innovation, explore new market opportunities, and bring products to markets faster.
With new data-intensive workloads at massive scale come new challenges. Weka’s Limitless Data Platform is storage with no equal, helping accelerate outcomes and improve productivity in the hybrid cloud. Delivered as a broad solution for many use cases through the Weka Innovation Network™ (WIN), the Platform is built on the Weka File System (WekaFS™), a software-defined architecture that delivers the industry’s best performance and efficiencies by leveraging the latest technologies in storage such as NVMe, networking technologies like NVMe-oF, NVIDIA Mellanox InfiniBand, 100Gb Ethernet, and advances in computing technologies like GPU acceleration.
The Weka data platform adds more enterprise features to help store, protect, and manage your data in the hybrid cloud. Key enhancements include:
Enterprise-Ready Features
- Consolidate All Your Workloads: With multi-protocol support across NFS, SMB, POSIX, Object/S3, NVIDIA® GPUDirect® Storage (GDS), and CSI customers can consolidate their data silos to get the most value out of their data.
- Built-In Data Protection: The Snap2Object feature now supports storing of snapshots on-premises or in the cloud or both for even more protection thereby eliminating the need for additional backup or Disaster Recovery (DR) software costs.
- Resilience by Design: Weka delivers resiliency at scale, with the data and metadata distributed across storage nodes, customers benefit from increased data protection without compromising scalability, capacity, or performance.
- Enterprise-Grade Security: Weka offers the industry’s most comprehensive end-to-end encryption across data at-rest and in-flight using XTS-AES 512 bit keys.
Simplicity and Choice
- Any Hardware: Weka can be deployed on industry-standard AMD or Intel x86-based servers supporting PCIe v4 doubling transmission speeds, and it enables customers to take advantage of technology improvements without forklift upgrades or vendor lock-in.
- Deploy Anywhere: Customers have several deployment options with Weka to satisfy their specific requirements ─ on dedicated storage nodes, inside the GPU node, or in the cloud.
- Extensibility to Cloud: Companies can seamlessly orchestrate their data across the hybrid cloud whether using the Cloud for DR or bursting for additional capacity or compute. The Weka data platform is integrated with Kubernetes, Rancher Labs, and Ansible making container orchestration and deployment across the hybrid cloud dramatically easier.
- Automated Data Optimization: Intelligent data tiering delivers the best economics by using the optimal mix of NVMe solid-state drives (SSDs) and hard disk drives (HDDs) for hot and cold data tiers.
- Get to Production Faster: Certified and validated reference architectures (RAs) with industry leaders, including NVIDIA, HPE and Supermicro provide confidence in interoperability and compatibility and further speed up time to results.
Scale Without Compromise
- Your Cloud. Your Way: Weka’s Cloud-Native architecture enables customers to dynamically scale up or scale down resources in the Cloud-based on workload requirements. For even more scalability, you can now scale across availability zones (AZs) without any performance degradation.
- Performance Across All Your Workloads: Customers no longer need to buy different architectures to support different workload requirements, manage all your data on a single platform, making storage silos a problem of the past. Weka’s Limitless Data Platform offers industry-leading performance, at any scale, for mixed workloads [small file and large file] while unifying and optimizing workloads across Flash and disk. Further, there is no need for up-front sizing, as the system expands capacity or performance during online operation.
- Built-In Cloud Tiering: Weka’s policy-based automated tiering feature transparently moves data to the public Cloud while simplifying management by presenting your data through an elastic, unified namespace.
WekaIO strategic investors include Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), NVIDIA, Seagate, and Western Digital Capital, the strategic investment fund of Western Digital Corp. (WDC). Weka’s Limitless Data Platform is available now and is sold and distributed through go-to-market and server partners in the Weka Innovation Network™ (WIN) such as Hitachi Vantara, HPE, AWS Marketplace, Supermicro, Dell, Penguin Computing, and Lenovo.
Additional resources:
- Webinar: The Past, Present and Future of Storage and Compute with WekaIO and NVIDIA
- Find a partner in the Weka Innovation Network (WIN)
- Weka AI Reference Architecture (RA) with NVIDIA DGX A100 Systems
- Achieving AWS Outposts Ready Designation
- Development of Kubernetes CSI Plugin for Application Agility
- Hybrid Cloud Storage Explained
Supporting Quotes
Liran Zvibel, Co-Founder and CEO, WekaIO
“Legacy approaches require different platforms to satisfy needs for simplicity, speed and scale. With the Weka Limitless Data Platform, customers gain competitive advantages, create new revenue opportunities, get products to market faster, solve previously unsolvable problems, achieve breakthroughs, perform better and create innovative business opportunities.”
Marc Hamilton, Vice President of Solutions Architecture, NVIDIA
“Modern-day AI and ML workloads require supercomputing-class infrastructure to meet the needs of complex and growing AI models and datasets, and this often creates an obstacle for MLOps practitioners looking to streamline and accelerate data pipelines. The Weka reference architecture, based on NVIDIA DGX systems and NVIDIA Mellanox networking, shortens the path to meaningful insights, allowing practitioners to stay focused on data science outcomes. Additionally, storage acceleration features like NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage translate directly to faster AI and ML business results.”
Wally MacDermid, Vice President of Strategic Alliances, Scality
“Scality RING certified with WekaFS as part of Weka’s Technology Alliance Program (TAP), enables a hybrid cloud architecture that solves archive strategies, DR, data security, cloud bursting, and more, at a lower TCO. Our combined solution manages huge amounts of data safely, cost-effectively, and in a unified, global namespace making it immediately accessible to the applications that need it.”
Matt Ritter, Director of Engineering, Silicon Mechanics (HPC/AI Solutions Provider), WIN Leader Partner
“Silicon Mechanics customers run complex, often massive HPC and AI workloads so the systems we design and build for them have to be robust, especially the storage portion of the hardware. The WekaIO Limitless Data Platform helps address issues of scalability and speed for these applications while also taking into account the massive amounts of data end users generate every day. This software-defined storage technology also makes Hybrid Cloud a more exciting option, thanks to enterprise-grade security, ease of deployment in a variety of computing models, and a variety of other major features.”
Herb Ahmuty, Solutions Architect, Meadowgate Technologies, WIN Catalyst Partner
“Our customers rely on our expertise to architect the best performing, most reliable, and trustworthy systems for their data centers and having the Weka Data Platform helps us meet those limitless customer demands. Weka can dramatically simplify the ease of use and management of our demanding customer’s environments plus our recent testing reached over 200GB/sec. The ability to have persistent storage for Kubernetes and allow any protocol access expands the scale of our use cases that makes the Weka Data Platform a winner.”
Eric Burgener, Research Director, Enterprise Infrastructure Practice, IDC
“As data has become a strategic asset for businesses, lifecycle management is paramount. Weka is in a new class of intelligent data platforms that has the capabilities to reduce friction, improve efficiencies, provide flexibility, and accelerate data pipelines with a platform that seamlessly accommodates the diversity and distribution of data in modern environments.”
Gartner Market Guide for Hybrid Cloud Storage, March 17, 2020, Julia Palmer, Raj Bala “Hybrid cloud storage solutions are evolving to leverage cloud infrastructure and platform services. These solutions enable I&O leaders to deliver agility, mobility, resiliency, and operational efficiency for on-premises, edge, and public cloud deployments. The hybrid cloud storage market is based on the notion of a seamless bridge between disparate data centers, edge locations, and public cloud infrastructure and platform services. While hybrid cloud storage can deliver on multiple use cases, currently disaster recovery is the most understood and funded by I&O leaders. By the end of 2024, more than 70% of hybrid cloud storage deployments will address disaster recovery, backup and business continuity use cases.”
2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2019/10/16/what-is-unstructured-data-and-why-is-it-so-important-to-businesses-an-easy-explanation-for-anyone/?sh=359a833815f6
About WekaIO
WekaIO (Weka) is used by eight of the Fortune 50 enterprise organizations to uniquely solve the newest, biggest problems holding back innovation and discovery. Weka solutions are purpose-built to future-ready the accelerated and agile data center. Optimized for NVMe-flash and the hybrid cloud, its advanced architecture handles the most demanding storage challenges in the most data-intensive technical computing environments, delivering truly epic performance at any scale, enabling organizations to maximize the full value of their data center investments. Weka helps the enterprise solve big IT infrastructure problems to accelerate business outcomes and speed productivity.
Media Contact
WEKA Communications
media.relations@weka.io
