WekaIO and Intel Demonstrate Native Scale-out NVMe-oF System at Flash Memory Summit

By CIOReview | Friday, August 11, 2017

SAN JOSE, CA: WekaIO, a high-performance cloud storage software company, is teaming up with Intel at the Flash Memory Summit (FMS) in Santa Clara, CA, to demonstrate a native NVMe-oF system on the new "ruler" form factor for Intel® SSDs which combined will deliver a revolutionary storage capacity of beyond 1PB in 1U while delivering in excess of 3 million IOPS.

Just last month, WekaIO introduced the industry's first cloud-native scalable file system that delivers unprecedented performance to applications, scaling to exabytes of data in a single namespace. WekaIO Matrix software will be showcased at FMS running on an NVME-oF system, equipped with "ruler" form factor for Intel® SSDs. The "ruler" form factor is designed from the ground up for data center racks to deliver high performance, space efficient capacity, and effective management and operations at scale.

Adding to the cloud inspired product line of the Intel SSD DC P4500 storage series, the "ruler" form factor for Intel® SSDs uses the WekaIO Matrix scale-out file system and Intel® 3D NAND technology, scaling beyond 1PB of storage and 3 million IOPS in a 1U appliance. The 1U form factor delivers exceptional capacity per rack unit enabling rack consolidation at data center scale.

"Storage subsystem architectures have not kept pace with the rapid evolution of computing architectures. For many data-intensive use cases, input/output (I/O) bottlenecks have hampered performance and scalability," according to Julia Palmer, Research Director at Gartner, et al. "NVMe-based storage architectures eliminate sequential access barriers and protocol redundancies to provide dramatic efficiencies in bandwidth and latency characteristics. These new storage subsystem architectures can alleviate the I/O bottlenecks experienced in data-intensive use cases, enabling higher performance and scalability. Use cases that can benefit from higher-performance storage architectures include databases, HPC, virtualization and web applications." - Gartner, The Future of Hyperconverged and Integrated Systems Will Be Shaped by Shared Accelerated Storage, Julia Palmer, Stanley Zaffors, Joseph Unsworth, and Chirag Dekat, May 25th, 2017.

Key features of the WekaIO solution include:

• A distributed file system to share data and meet full POSIX compliance
• Storage density scaling to beyond 1PB per rack unit
• Disaggregated storage that eliminates the need to retrofit existing servers and enables independent scaling of capacity
• Native NVMe for massive performance gains, lower latency and performance that is faster than traditional filers

"WekaIO is excited to work with Intel to demonstrate how our combined technologies can dramatically reduce a customer's storage footprint with more capacity per unit and higher file performance that has yet to be seen on the market," said Dr. Omri Palmon, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at WekaIO. "These technologies have the potential to deliver an unmatched customer experience, making it easy to scale storage and ramp up performance to new levels without having to retrofit their existing hardware."

"Intel has a long history of storage innovation. The new "ruler" form factor SSDs extend that history, providing new levels of high performance, dense storage at lower cost," said James Myers, Director of Non-volatile Memory Solutions Architecture at Intel. "Intel® 3D NAND technology based ruler SSDs demonstrate unmatched physical space efficiency with spectacular performance for shared file storage."

This technology is ideal for organizations that require the highest possible performance in the smallest footprint, supporting data intensive and performance hungry applications such as electronic design automation, IoT and real-time analytics and financial modeling.

See this technology demonstrated at the FMS conference August 8-10 in the Intel Partner Pavilion, Hall C-D, booth 745.

Liran Zvibel, co-founder and CTO at WekaIO will be presenting "Designing Next-Generation File Systems for NVMe and NVMe-oF," at the FMS conference on Thursday, August 10, from 9:45 a.m. -10:50 a.m.