WekaIO's President sees the company as the Tesla of storage suppliers, and says OEM Hitachi Vantara is making inroads into the Dell EMC Isilon customer base as Weka crosses the chasm between it and general enterprise use. WekaIO's scalable, parallel and high-performance filesystem software has made its name in high-performance computing and become popular in enterprises that have HPC use cases -- such as AI, machine learning, and genomics. It's now set to cross over into more general enterprise file workloads. BMW motorcycle-riding Jonathan Martin became WekaIO's President this month. He had previously been the Chief Marketing Officer at Hitachi Vantara, serving from March 2019 to May 2021.

WIRE)--WekaIO (Weka), the fastest-growing data platform for artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), life sciences research, enterprise technical computing, and high-performance data analytics (HPDA), today announced that it has been named a finalist in The Business Intelligence Group's inaugural Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards program. The Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards recognizes those organizations and products that are truly unique and making an impact on the market. Weka's Limitless Data Platform is built on a shareable, scalable, and distributed file storage system (WekaFS). Designed to help future-ready clients' data centers and enable digital transformation, the breakthrough WekaFS solution was architected to leverage the performance benefits of flash, high-speed networking, and compute acceleration technologies (like GPUs) whether the data resides on-premises, in the public cloud, or as a hybrid model. WekaFS stands out as a leading solution because it gives clients the leverage to get more value out of their compute resources, providing a full enterprise-grade solution with advanced security and full cloud integration.

There is an old saying that data rises to meet available storage. That is one reason I laughed at the phrase "big data" when it came out. We've always been working with as much data as possible. What has changed now is that the data volumes in artificial intelligence (AI), HPC, and other modern arenas is finally hitting a wall that's not storage space or processing power, it's the bandwidth for the two work together with low latency for the variety of data requests that exist. Newer solutions are coming out in order to address that problem.

Today WekaIO announced that The Business Intelligence Group has named Weka a winner in its Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards program. The Weka File System (WekaFS), Weka's flagship product that is uniquely built to solve big problems, delivers the industry's best performance at any scale. WekaFS has a clean sheet design that handles the demands of new emerging and converging workloads, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine/deep learning (ML/DL), high-performance data analytics (HPDA), and high-performance computing (HPC). The file system can deliver 80 GB/sec of bandwidth to a single GPU server, scale to Exabytes in a single namespace, and support an entire pipeline for edge-to-core-to-cloud workflows. The system also delivers operational agility with versioning, explainability, and reproducibility along with governance and compliance with in-line encryption and data protection.

CAMPBELL, Calif., March 26, 2020 – WekaIO (Weka) announced that The Business Intelligence Group has named Weka a winner in its Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards program. The Weka File System (WekaFS), Weka's flagship product that is uniquely built to solve big problems, delivers the industry's best performance at any scale. WekaFS has a clean sheet design that handles the demands of new emerging and converging workloads, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine/deep learning (ML/DL), high-performance data analytics (HPDA), and high-performance computing (HPC). The file system can deliver 80 GB/sec of bandwidth to a single GPU server, scale to Exabytes in a single namespace, and support an entire pipeline for edge-to-core-to-cloud workflows. The system also delivers operational agility with versioning, explainability, and reproducibility along with governance and compliance with in-line encryption and data protection.

WIRE)--WekaIO (Weka), the innovation leader in high-performance, scalable file storage for data-intensive applications, today announced that Innoviz, a leading manufacturer of high-performance, solid-state Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors and Perception Software that enables the mass-production of autonomous vehicles, has selected the Weka File System (WekaFS) to accelerate its Artificial Intelligence (AI) and deep learning workflows. WekaFS has been chosen by Innoviz to improve application performance at scale and deliver high bandwidth I/O to its GPU cluster. Innoviz's solid-state LiDAR sensors are key to the future of autonomous cars. The sensors and Perception Software, which identifies, classifies, segments, and tracks objects to give autonomous vehicles a better understanding of the 3D driving scene, rely heavily on AI. Having recently closed its Series C funding round with $170M secured, Innoviz is choosing and developing the right technologies to empower it to realize its expansion plans and enhance its manufacturing capabilities.

Manjrekar comes to WekaIO from SwiftStack, a leading provider of data storage and management solutions for data-driven customers. During his time at SwiftStack, he was Head of AI, responsible for Product, Solutions, and Corporate Development. Prior to SwiftStack, he had roles as Senior Director at Vexata, EMC, NetApp, Force10 Networks and previously held Senior Eng. Manjrekar is a seasoned IT professional who has extensive experience in building and managing emerging businesses across the USA, Asia, and EMEA. He brings an established background in providing effective product management, solutions marketing, and strategic alliances, along with a strong sense of business development vision and leadership to his new position.

Today WekaIO announced Supermicro, a global leader in enterprise computing, storage, networking solutions and green computing technology, is an authorized OEM partner. The Supermicro BigTwin Server featuring the WekaIO File System, WekaFS, is the industry's first and only 2U multi-node system supporting the highest performance processor, memory, storage, and I/O at an incredible 30 percent better thermal capacity with the ability to lower energy consumption in the datacenter. This appliance is an integrated, preconfigured solution that delivers unmatched performance at scale. The BigTwin Server featuring WekaFS offering is a milestone in our relationship with Supermicro," said Barbara Murphy, Vice President of Marketing at WekaIO. "The solution is already in use by many customers with deep learning applications and exceeding expectations for performance and value. By offering this preconfigured solution with Supermicro, we'll be able to simplify the customers' acquisition experience."

No matter the domain, data-intensive apps share one requirement in common: a reliable file system that ensures data is available to them on demand. Pure Storage, NetApp, VAST Data, IBM Spectrum Scale, and Dell EMC provide this, as does San Jose, California-based company WekaIO. WekaIO's high-velocity Matrix platform takes advantage of flash storage, off-the-shelf components, and sophisticated software techniques to deliver enormous speedups at exabyte scale. In fact, the company claims Matrix is the fastest parallel file system on the market for AI and technical compute workloads, as measured by independent SPEC SFS 2014 benchmark tests. To lay the groundwork for future growth in AI and analytics, life sciences, manufacturing, media and entertainment, and financial services, WekaIO has closed a $31.7 million series C financing round led by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), with participation from a host of storage and computing industry giants including Mellanox, Nvidia, Seagate, Western Digital Capital, and Qualcomm.

Matrix is the fastest, most scalable parallel file system for AI and technical compute workloads. TuSimple's goal is to develop a Level 4 autonomous truck driving solution, for the dock-to-dock delivery of commercial goods. The company, which was founded by entrepreneurs from the California Institute of Technology, has facilities in San Diego, Calif. and Tucson, Ariz., and to date its technology has been road-tested for some 15,000 miles. TuSimple chose WekaIO Matrix after comparisons with other scale-out file systems demonstrated that only Matrix has the ability to meet its most demanding performance requirements. "WekaIO Matrix was the clear choice for our on-premises DNN training in the U.S. It was understood from the outset that a standard network-attached storage (NAS) solution would not be able to scale to the extent we would need it to, and apart from Matrix being the most performant of all the parallel file systems we evaluated, we really liked the fact that it is hardware-independent, allowing us better control over our infrastructure costs. We are also taking full advantage of WekaIO's object storage capability, which is much more economical than an all-flash system, and allows us to efficiently scale our data catalog in a single namespace," said Dr. Xiaodi Hou, Co-founder and CTO at TuSimple.