WekaIO, new player for new demanding needs

Weka.IO (www.weka.io), a new file storage player, confirms the need for a new file storage approach. Under stealth mode, the IT Press Tour had the chance and privilege to visit the Weka R&D center in Tel-Aviv last November with several key executives of the company. We realized the potential of the solution that really changes the file storage market landscape. So far, the company has raised 2 VC rounds for a total of $32M and we expect a series C soon to boost development, geo expansion and marketing.

Since that, product development addresses and illustrates vertical business cases such Oil and Gas, Media and Entertainment, Life Sciences and Electronic Design Automation when high IOPS, large bandwidth and low latency are a must. The company positioned itself as a cloud-native scalable file system. It reminds me something when I tried a few years ago to position a product towards a scalable file storage angle. Management refused the market reality and claimed to be a scale-out NAS, the Isilon 2.0, having some difficulties to understand market dynamics and distinctions between utopia, dream and reality. What a joke it was, check today, I was right, just the facts...

Back to Weka, the firm chose to wait some real adoption and strong references by customers to officially appears on the market. As covered several months ago (June 2016 and Nov. 2016), Weka represents a good mix between performance, scalability and cloud economics. It also confirms that object storage is a capacity play even if some players have dreams.

Weka Matrix presents a single namespace from local SSD/Flash drives and considers a S3- or Swift-based secondary storage for cold data. The data evacuated remains accessible through the primary namespace.

Weka already published several performance reports that perfectly shows the growing place of HPC-like file storage within the enterprise. Perfectly executed, the strategy invite them to be on the M&A list of several potential acquirers. We really hope to meet and visit Weka again during a next IT Press Tour before te end of the year. In a similar approach, we invite the reader to watch as well Avere Systems, DDN Storage, Elastifile, Panasas, Primary Data, Qumulo and Rozo Systems that sometimes compete against Weka as well.