Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 19.  My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

WekaIO recently presented at Storage Field Day 19. You can see videos of their presentation here, and download my rough notes from here.

 

More Data And New Architectures

Liran Zvibel (Co-founder and CEO) spent some time talking about the explosion in data storage requirements in the next 4 – 5 years. It was suggested that most of this growth will come in the form of unstructured data. The problem with today’s storage systems, he suggested, was that storage is broken into “Islands of Compromise” categories – each category carries a leader. What does that mean exactly? DAS and SAN cannot share data easily, and the performance of a number of NAS and Object architectures isn’t great.

A New Storage Category

WekaIO is positioning itself in a new storage category. One that delivers:

• The highest performance for any workload
• Complete data shareability
• Cloud native, hybrid cloud support
• Full enterprise features
• Simple management

Unique Product Differentiation

So what is that sets WekaIO apart from the rest of the storage industry? Zvibel listed a number of differentiators, including:

• Only POSIX namespace that scales to exabytes of capacity and trillions of files
• Only networked file system that is faster than local storage
  • Massively parallel
  • Lowest latency
• Snap to object
  • Unique blend of All-Flash and Object storage for instant backup to cloud storage (no backup software required)
• Cloud burst from on-premises to public cloud
  • Fully hybrid cloud enabled with highest performance
• End-to-end data encryption with no performance degradation
  • Critical for modern workloads and compliance

[image courtesy of Barbara Murphy]

 

Customer Examples

This all sounds great, but where is WekaIO really being used effectively? Barbara Murphy spent some time talking with the delegates about a number of customer examples across the following market verticals.

Life sciences

• Genomics sequencing and analytics
• Drug discovery
• Microscopy

Deep Learning

• Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence
• Real-time analytics
• IoT

 

Thoughts and Further Reading

I’ve written enthusiastically about WekaIO before. It’s easy to get caught up in some of the hype that seems to go hand in hand with WekaIO presentations. But WekaIO has a lot of data to back up its claims, and it’s taken an interesting approach to solving traditional storage problems in a non-traditional fashion. I like that there’s a strong cloud story there, as well as the potential to leverage the latest hardware advancements to deliver the performance companies need.

The analysts and storage vendors drone on and on about the explosion in data growth over the coming years, but it’s a real problem. Our workload challenges are changing as well, and it seems like a new approach is needed for how we approach some of these challenges. The scale of the data that needs to be crunched doesn’t always mean that DAS is a good option. You’re more likely to see these kinds of challenges show up in the science and technology industries. And WekaIO seems to be well-positioned to meet these challenges, whether it’s in public cloud or on-premises. It strikes me that WekaIO’s focus on performance and resilience, along with a robust software-defined architecture, has it in a good position to tackle the types of workload problems we’re seeing at the edge and in AI / ML focused environments. I’m really looking forward to seeing what comes next for WekaIO.