IT organizations are adopting cloud technology for its fluid, on-demand scalability that supports diverse workloads at scale. However, while network and compute can be virtualized to operate at scale very effectively, storage remains largely isolated in silos based on system performance profiles. Consequently, organizations are forced to architect a storage system that is highly customized for their environment and workloads from building blocks that do not scale. The result is a storage solution that is complex, temperamental, expensive, and slow.

WekaIO has built a software-only, high-performance file-based storage solution that is highly scalable and easy to deploy, configure, manage, and expand. The design philosophy behind the Weka file system (WekaFS™) was to create a single storage 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.

Part of WekaFS’s ease of use and cloud-like experience includes rapid provisioning to reduce time to get new workloads deployed, along with elasticity scaling, resiliency, performance, and cost effectiveness. This whitepaper illustrates the WekaIO file system architecture.