WekaIO Limitless Data Platform helps store, protect, and manage data in the hybrid cloud

WekaIO announced the Limitless Data Platform—a simple, fast, and scalable platform for running modern enterprise workloads. Weka is one of the fastest-growing data platforms for modern enterprise workloads such as artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), life sciences research, and high-performance data analytics (HPDA).

Enterprises are experiencing an explosive growth of unstructured data. According to IDC projections, 80 percent of worldwide data will be unstructured by 2025 and is growing at a rate of 55 to 65 percent each year. Enterprises that harness the power of their data can drive innovation, explore new market opportunities, and bring products to markets faster.

With new data-intensive workloads at massive scale come new challenges. Weka’s 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 one of 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.

The Weka data platform adds more enterprise features to help store, protect, and manage your data in the hybrid cloud.

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 protection: The Snap2Object feature now supports storing of snapshots on-premises or in the cloud or both for even more protection thereby eliminating the need for additional backup or Disaster Recovery (DR) software costs.
• Resilience by design: Weka 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: Weka offers the industry’s most comprehensive end-to-end encryption across data at-rest and in-flight using XTS-AES 512 bit keys.

Simplicity and choice

• Any hardware: Weka can be deployed on industry-standard 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 seamlessly orchestrate their data across the hybrid cloud 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 making container orchestration and deployment across the hybrid cloud dramatically easier.
• Automated data optimization: Intelligent data tiering delivers the best economics by using the optimal mix of NVMe solid-state drives (SSDs) and hard disk drives (HDDs) for hot and cold data tiers.
• Get to production faster: Certified and validated reference architectures (RAs) with industry leaders, 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: Weka’s cloud-native architecture enables customers to dynamically scale up or scale down resources in the cloud-based on workload requirements. For even 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. 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.
• Built-In cloud tiering: Weka’s policy-based automated tiering feature transparently moves data to the public Cloud while simplifying management by presenting your data through an elastic, unified namespace.

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.

Liran Zvibel, Co-Founder and CEO, WekaIO: “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 andcreate innovative business opportunities.”

Marc Hamilton, Vice President of Solutions Architecture, NVIDIA: “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.”