Weka Signs OEM Agreement with Hitachi Vantara

Campbell, Calif., July 21, 2020

The global partnership will produce a distributed file system and management solution to help customers gain faster access and insights from unstructured data.

WekaIO™ (Weka), the innovation leader in high-performance, scalable file storage for data-intensive applications, today announced that it has entered into an OEM agreement with Hitachi Vantara for Weka’s industry-leading HPC storage software, WekaFS™. WekaFS software is the world’s fastest* distributed file system architected to integrate NVMe and S3 storage on-premises, while providing full protocol access and the ability to burst workloads to the cloud.

The OEM agreement brings together category leaders Weka, for distributed file systems, and Hitachi Vantara, for object storage, to deliver a single engineered solution tuned to meet the performance and capacity demands of mixed workloads common in artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning, and high-performance computing (HPC). A single offering that combines the unmatched performance of the Weka File System with the unbeatable scalability of Hitachi Vantara object storage will reduce the high cost of storage management overhead and running AI and analytics workloads, increase business agility, and improve time to market.

Commenting on today’s announcement, Patricia Harris, vice president, Digital Infrastructure Marketing at Hitachi Vantara, said, “As the volume of unstructured data skyrockets within organizations, the full-stack integration provided by our partnership with Weka helps organizations avoid overprovisioning data storage as their business requirements change. The complete end-to-end stack support delivered by Hitachi Vantara will simplify management for our customers.”

Leveraging the advanced functionality of Hitachi object storage, WekaFS benefits customers by delivering distributed data protection and scale-out metadata services, snapshots to object storage with no performance loss, integrated tiering to disk and cloud bursting for best economics, NVMe-oF shared file system for performance, and full protocol access.

“WekaFS provides a first-mover customer advantage by leveraging the world’s fastest file system to help solve today’s and tomorrow’s biggest AI problems. WekaFS is ideal for organizations investing in modernizing their infrastructure with GPUs and flash and wanting future-proofed, software-defined agility to drive the new applications and models for AI, deep learning, and HPC,” said Andrew Perry, WekaIO’s vice president of sales. “The turnkey solution from Hitachi Vantara will consistently deliver the shortest time to market for AI initiatives, which for customers translates into faster time to value.”

Additional resources:

• WekaIO blog post: “Two Category Leaders Collaborate to Solve HPC Storage for Data Analytics, AI/ML Workloads,” by Shailesh Manjrekar, head of AI at WekaIO
• Hitachi Vantara news release, “Hitachi Vantara Helps Customers Reach New Speeds for Unstructured Data and High-Performance Workloads”
• Hitachi Vantara blog post, “Object Storage Comes of Age,”by Patricia Harris, vice president, Digital Infrastructure Marketing

* Weka delivers record-breaking results on STAC-M3 benchmarks, Weka Places First on IO-500 Challenge, WekaIO Cements its Storage Leadership with Groundbreaking Performance and Latency Results on SPEC SFS 2014