WekaIO Extends Data Management Capability to AWS, IBM, More

WekaIO, the provider of high-performance, scalable file storage for data intensive applications, on Tuesday said it has developed reference architectures with more than a half-dozen object storage technology providers, enabling them to work with WekaIO’s data management capabilities.

The company’s alliance technology partners include AWS, Cloudian, Hitachi Vantara, IBM, Seagate, Quantum, and Scality and more.

WekaIO’s Shailesh Manjrekar

“The industry knows us as a high-performance player,” said Shailesh Manjrekar, head of AI and strategic alliances at WekaIO. “But, what we haven’t spoken about much is data management capability. The reason why we’re talking about more now is that there are several customers buying us just for that capability.”

These customers deal in petabyte, or big business problems. Manjrekar notes that unlike its competitors, WekaIO uses a hybrid approach in its storage solutions. The company wins by using NVMe flash with cloud object storage. WekaFS (file system) provides the ease of managing petabytes of data in a single, unified namespace wherever in the pipeline the data is stored, he said.

Benefits — A Closer Look

The vendor’s unified storage solutions with cloud-native ecosystem partners offers multiple benefits.

• Faster actionable business intelligence from a single high-performance storage solution.
• Cost-efficiency with the ability to manage, scale and share project data.
• Operational agility eliminating storage silos across edge, core, and cloud.
• Enterprise robustness and secure data governance.

Regarding the cloud-native data management capabilities, a single click extends NVMe flash namespace or an object tier. Another capability is snap-to-object. This addresses the metadata and not just the data. The snap-to-object feature captures a point-in-time copy of the entire, unified [flash and object store] file namespace that can be presented as another file namespace instance in a private or public cloud. Weka’s integrated snapshots and end-to-end encryption features ensure data is always backed up and secure throughout its life cycle. WekaFS also provides immutability and data mobility for these data sets with instant recovery.

WekaIO sees traction in use cases such as AI/ML, IoT, high performance data analytics, geonomics, life sciences and financial services. With a rise in these types of use cases comes an increase in data — in particular, unstructured data. The goal of the startup, founded in 2014, is to address the scalability and performance challenges of unstructured data.

WekaIO has three pillars to support accelerated DataOps capability:

• Ability to run in AI, BI and cloud-native applications with the same storage substrate.
• Accelerated DataOps for operational agility — unlike traditional protection mechanisms that break down when dealing with petabytes of data.
• Enterprise readiness and governance. WekaIO offers end-to-end encryption and virtual filesystems.

In addition to its technology alliance partners, WekaIO also works with resellers. The types of partners WekaIO looks for have AI and high-performance computing (HPC) practices. They also have proof-of-concept (POC) labs for testing and validation with the customer.