Nov. 11, 2020 – WekaIO (Weka), a specialist in high-performance and scalable NVMe-optimized file storage, today announced that Weka AI was honored with Flash Memory Summit’s 2020 Best of Show Award for Most Innovative AI (Artificial Intelligence) Application at today’s FMS virtual awards ceremony.
FMS, the storage industry conference focused on flash technology innovation, has recognized the impact of Weka AI to empower data-driven personas to derive actionable intelligence using popular MLOps platforms and complements their workflows by enabling Accelerated DataOps for massive datasets. By providing direct access to data for training and inferencing, Weka AI eliminates data staging at the compute layer and storage silos which results in shorter epoch and wall clock time.
According to show organizers, a record number of award submissions were received this year making the judging challenging and each of the categories extremely competitive.
“AI solutions need storage technologies that can deliver high levels of performance, scale linearly and meet customer service level objectives for industry-specific application workloads,” said Jay Kramer, Chairman of the Awards’ Program and President of Network Storage Advisors Inc. “We are pleased to recognize Weka AI for accelerating DataOps and uniquely enabling end-users to leverage AI for monetizing their data, launching new business models, and seamlessly embedding AI into their existing business applications across vertical markets like autonomous vehicles/Mobility as a Service, healthcare, life sciences, and the financial services industry.”
Weka AI is a solutions framework, underpinned by the Weka parallel file system (WekaFS), and engineered to solve Accelerated DataOps challenges, delivering Reference Architectures (RAs) and Software Development Kits with leading Weka Technology Alliance Partners™ (WTAP). Weka AI is the industry’s only software-defined solutions framework to support GPU accelerated computing, delivering 50x performance acceleration compared to CPU-based solutions. It provides a production-ready and end-to-end storage solution for the entire AI data pipeline—ingest, to batch feature extraction, to hyperparameter optimization, to inferencing and versioning. Weka AI is validated with leading GPU-based platforms as well as AWS Outposts, enabling edge-to-core-to-cloud workflows, for a truly consistent hybrid experience.
Added Kramer, “Software-defined storage is changing the datacenter by offering customers more choices in their on-premises and cloud-based AI solutions.”
“FMS is among the most respected flash storage programs in the industry so to have Weka AI recognized with the coveted Best of Show Award is indeed a tremendous honor,” said Shailesh Manjrekar, head of AI and strategic alliances at WekaIO. “We launched Weka AI to simplify the use of AI/ML for businesses with an AI-first strategy. The RAs with companies in the WTAP program deliver end-to-end pipeline acceleration for Data Scientists, Chief Data Officers, and Chief Analytics Officers to embark on their AI journey. The high performance and low latency delivered with NVMe technology, are imperative for modern AI applications both on-premises and in the cloud. Customers using Weka AI today are reaping the benefits within their AI data pipelines.”
For a list of all the 2020 FMS Award winners go to https://flashmemorysummit.com/English/News_Info/Best_of_Show/BOS_Winners.html
