WekaIO, Western Digital push ahead on NVMe collaboration

The expanded collaboration follows successful work between the two companies to address complex, next-generation application workloads, as well as a strategic investment in WekaIO from Western Digital Capital, the strategic investment fund of Western Digital, to accelerate the adoption of NVMe flash and object storage in the enterprise.

The enterprise market is keen for NVMe to accelerate the performance of traditional HPC and ML workloads, making the collaboration between WekaIO and Western Digital advantageous for users looking to deploy fast and scale-out architectures.

Both companies are leading initiatives to bring NVMe technology to enterprise applications that demand low-latency and superior performance.

This includes applications with a high concentration of data that does not get changed or modified, such as image recognition, stock market trades, geospatial imaging and text. These data sets are common in many ML and HPC workloads and significantly benefit from the performance enhancement of Western Digital’s NVMe platforms, and the durability and scalability of ActiveScale object storage in a scale-out namespace. 

By enabling WekaIO Matrix, the world’s fastest parallel file system, on Western Digital’s NVMe platforms, and offering a snaspshot capability to ActiveScale object storage systems, customers receive a fast and cost-efficient cloud architecture that helps move, protect, transform and extract greater value from data.

“We have been collaborating with Western Digital for the past two years on joint customer implementations, and the strategic investment firmly underscores the long-term potential our innovations offer the rapidly evolving storage marketplace,” said Liran Zvibel, co-founder and CEO of WekaIO. “Our NVMe-native, parallel file system delivers industry leading performance to the most demanding data-intensive applications. Western Digital and WekaIO’s joint solution delivers incredible economics driven by the right balance of high-performance NVMe flash and the highly-efficient cost of petabyte-scale cloud object storage.”

The collaboration includes engineering and marketing alignment to optimise software-defined storage features that enable a tighter integration of WekaIO Matrix software with the Western Digital NVMe platform portfolio and the ActiveScale object storage system to deliver more innovative and cost-efficient solutions to market.

“Together, Western Digital and WekaIO have enjoyed significant customer wins in the machine learning and HPC markets over the last year, with our joint solution built on the Matrix software and Western Digital’s ActiveScale object storage system,” said Phil Bullinger, senior vice president and general manager, Data Center Systems business unit, Western Digital. “This continued collaboration will serve to strengthen our combined proposition in HPC and machine learning, where datasets are massive. Together, WekaIO and Western Digital are well positioned to deliver incredible price/performance and value to the market.”