WekaIO Limitless Data Platform Solution’s Hybrid Cloud Capabilities Accelerate Business Outcomes and Improves Productivity

WekaIO, Inc. announced the Limitless Data Platform, a simple, fast, and scalable platform for running modern enterprise workloads.

It is a fast growing data platform for modern enterprise workloads such as AI/ML, life sciences research, and high-performance data analytics (HPDA),

Enterprises are experiencing a growth of unstructured data. According to IDC, 80% of WW data will be unstructured by 2025 ⁽¹⁾ and is growing at a rate of 55-65% each year ⁽²⁾. Enterprises that harness the power of their data can drive innovation, explore new market opportunities, and bring products to markets faster.

With data-intensive workloads at massive scale come new challenges. 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 performance and efficiencies by leveraging technologies in storage such as NVMe, networking technologies like NVMe-oF, Nvidia Mellanox InfiniBand, 100GbE, and advances in computing technologies like GPU acceleration.

Company’s data platform adds more enterprise features to help store, protect, and manage your data in  hybrid cloud. Key enhancements include:

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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 drotection: The Snap2Object feature supports storing of snapshots on-premises or in the cloud or both for even more protection thereby eliminating the need for additional backup or DR software costs.

• Resilience by design: The firm 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: The company offers an end-to-end encryption across data at-rest and in-flight using XTS-AES 512 bit keys.

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Simplicity and choice:

• Any hardware: The company’s offer can be deployed on 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 orchestrate their data across the hybrid cloud whether using the Cloud for DR or bursting for additional capacity or compute. The firm’s data platform is integrated with Kubernetes, Rancher Labs, and Ansible making container orchestration and deployment across the hybrid cloud easier.

• Automated data optimization: Intelligent data tiering delivers the best economics by using the optimal mix of NVMe SSDs and HDDs for hot and cold data tiers.

• Get to production faster: Certified and validated reference architectures (RAs) with vendors 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: The firm’s cloud-native architecture enables customers to dynamically scale up or scale down resources in the Cloud-based on workload requirements. For 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. The company‘s Limitless Data Platform offers 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: The firm‘s policy-based automated tiering feature transparently moves data to the public cloud while simplifying management by presenting data through an elastic, unified namespace.

The company’s strategic investors include (HPE, Nvidia, Seagate, and Western Digital Capital, the strategic investment fund of Western Digital Corp.

The Limitless Data Platform is available and is sold and distributed through go-to-market and server partners in the WIN network such as Hitachi Vantara, HPE, AWS Marketplace, Supermicro, Dell, Penguin Computing, and Lenovo.

Liran Zvibel, co-founder and CEO, WekaIO, said: “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, VP, solutions architecture, Nvidia Corp., said: ““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, VP, strategic alliances, Scality SA, said: “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, engineering, Silicon Mechanics (HPC/AI Solutions Provider), WIN leader partner, said: “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 SDS 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, said: “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/s. 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, said: “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.“

Julia Palmer, Raj Bala, Gartner Market Guide for Hybrid Cloud Storage, March 17, 2020, said: “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 DR 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 DR, backup and BC use cases.“

Resources:
Weka AI Reference Architecture (RA) with NVIDIA DGX A100 Systems
Achieving AWS Outposts Ready Designation
Development of Kubernetes CSI Plugin for Application Agility

⁽¹⁾ 80% of Your Data Will Be Unstructured in 5 Years
⁽²⁾ What Is Unstructured Data And Why Is It So Important To Businesses? An Easy Explanation For Anyone