WekaIO Eliminates the Need for Legacy External Storage with Cloud-Scale Storage Software

By CIOReview | Monday, July 24, 2017

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SAN JOSE, CA: WekaIO, a venture backed high-performance cloud storage software company, today emerged from stealth to introduce the industry’s first cloud-native scalable file system that delivers unprecedented performance to applications, scaling to Exabytes of data in a single namespace. Headquartered in San Jose, CA, WekaIO has developed the first software platform that harnesses flash technology to create a high-performance parallel scale out file storage solution for both on-premises servers and public clouds.

WekaIO is the world’s fastest distributed file system, processing four times the workload compared to IBM Spectrum Scale™ measured on Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC®) SFS 2014, an independent industry benchmark. Utilizing only 120 cloud compute instances with locally attached storage, WekaIO completed 1,000 simultaneous software builds compared to 240 on IBM’s high-end FlashSystem® 900. The WekaIO software utilized only 5% of the AWS compute instance resources, leaving 95% available to run customer applications.

“TGen is dedicated to the next revolution in precision medicine—with the goal of better patient outcomes driving our core principles,” said Nelson Kick, manager of HPC operations at TGen. “Future-thinking companies like WekaIO, complement our core principle of accelerating research and discovery. The ability to run more concurrent high performance genomic workloads will significantly advance our time to discovery.”

Scott Sinclair, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group states, “ESG tested WekaIO and validated millions of IOPs and GBs of throughput for common I/O sizes, while linear scalability was achieved in a cloud deployment consisting of up to 120 nodes. WekaIO enables seamless data movement from on-prem to public cloud environments delivering cloud-like scale and agility with all-flash storage performance. As performance is a key consideration in choosing converged infrastructure—WekaIO is well-positioned to deliver.”

WekaIO is attracting attention from Fortune 500 organizations because it challenges conventional wisdom when it comes to performance, scalability and cloud economics. Unlike traditional storage solutions, WekaIO eliminates bottlenecks and storage silos by aggregating local SSDs inside the servers into one logical pool, which is then presented as a single namespace to the host applications. A transparent tiering layer offloads cold data to any S3 or Swift cloud object store for unlimited capacity scaling, under the same single namespace. The resulting solution helps organizations eliminate their storage challenges in a fundamentally different way. WekaIO leapfrogs legacy storage infrastructure through this radically new software defined environment.

“WekaIO’s innovative approach to high performance storage solves a critical need for organizations while simplifying their storage process,” said Quinn Li, vice president and global head of Qualcomm Ventures, the investment arm of Qualcomm Incorporated. “We are excited to support their efforts as they continue to transform the legacy storage industry.”

WekaIO is experiencing high levels of interest and demand from industries such as media and entertainment, life sciences, engineering design and manufacturing, where large bandwidth, high IOPs and low-latency requirements are critical for fast time to results.

“Data is at the heart of every business but many industries are hurt by the performance limitations of their storage infrastructure,” said Michael Raam, president and CEO of WekaIO. “We are heralding a new era of storage, having developed a true scale-out data infrastructure that puts independent, on-demand capacity and performance control into the hands of our customers. It’s exciting to be part of a company that delivers a true revolution for the storage industry.”

With a deep pedigree in storage technologies, Liran Zvibel, Omri Palmon, and Maor Ben-Dayan founded WekaIO in 2013, as their second venture following XIV, which was acquired by IBM in 2008. In addition to their offices in California, WekaIO has global R&D located in Tel Aviv, Israel.

WekaIO and its global partners are accepting purchase orders for its software effective immediately.