WekaIO (Weka) today announced the Limitless Data Platform — described by the company as a simple, fast and scalable platform for running modern enterprise workloads, such as artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), life sciences research and high-performance data analytics (HPDA).
The Weka data platform offers enterprise features designed to help store, protect and manage data in the hybrid cloud, including:
- Workload Consolidation: With multi-protocol support across NFS, SMB, POSIX, Object/S3, Nvidia GPUDirect Storage (GDS) and CSI, customers can consolidate data silos.
- Data Protection: Snap2Object supports storing of snapshots on-premises or in the cloud, or both, for protection, eliminating the need for additional backup or disaster recovery (DR) software costs.
- Resilience: Weka said it delivers resiliency at scale, with data and metadata distributed across storage nodes, data protection is improved without compromising scalability, capacity or performance.
- Enterprise-Grade Security: Weka said it offers comprehensive end-to-end encryption across data at-rest and in-flight using XTS-AES 512 bit keys.
- Hardware: Weka can be deployed on industry-standard AMD or Intel x86-based servers supporting PCIe v4 doubling transmission speeds, and it enables use of technology improvements without forklift upgrades or vendor lock-in.
- Deployment: Customers have several deployment options ─ on dedicated storage nodes, inside the GPU node or in the cloud.
- Cloud Extensibility: Data orchestration across the hybrid cloud is enabled 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, simplifying container orchestration and deployment across the hybrid cloud, according to the company.
- Data Optimization: Weka said the platform’s intelligent data tiering delivers economics by using the optimal mix of NVMe solid-state drives (SSDs) and hard disk drives (HDDs) for hot and cold data tiers.
- Getting to Production: Certified and validated reference architectures (RAs) with Nvidia, HPE, Supermicro and other companies provides interoperability, compatibility and improved time to results, according to Weka.
- Cloud: Weka’s Cloud-Native architecture enables dynamically scaling up or down in the cloud. The platform also offers scalability across availability zones (AZs) without performance degradation, Weka said.
- Performance Across 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,” the company said in its announcement. “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.”
- Cloud Tiering: Weka’s policy-based automated tiering moves data to a public cloud while simplifying management by presenting your data through an elastic, unified namespace.
In its announcement, Weka noted that enterprises are experiencing rapid growth of unstructured data, citing IDC projections that by 2025, 80 percent of worldwide data will be unstructured and is growing at a rate of 55-65 percent annually. Enterprises that harness the power of their data can drive innovation, explore new market opportunities, and bring products to markets faster, Weka said.
“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),” the company said, “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.”
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.
