Overview of the WEKA Data Platform
The WEKA Data Platform is a sophisticated, software-defined storage solution designed to meet the demanding needs of data-driven organizations, particularly those involved in artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC), and other data-intensive workloads.
What WEKA Does
WEKA enables organizations to store, process, and manage data seamlessly across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid cloud environments. This platform is built to eliminate the traditional compromises between speed, simplicity, scale, and sustainability, making it an ideal choice for next-generation workloads such as AI, ML, HPC, and more.
Key Features
Mindbending Speed
The WEKA Data Platform delivers unparalleled performance, supporting high I/O, low latency, and mixed workloads without the need for tuning. It is optimized for handling small files and large datasets, ensuring that data pipelines run efficiently and quickly.
Seductive Simplicity
WEKA simplifies data infrastructure by providing a single, easy-to-use platform that eliminates storage silos. This unified approach streamlines data management across different environments, reducing complexity and the need for specialized storage training.
Infinite Scale
The platform scales both compute and storage independently and linearly, whether on-premises or in the cloud. This scalability supports handling tens of millions to billions of files of all data types and sizes, ensuring that performance grows in line with the size of the cluster.
Key Functionality
Distributed and Shareable Filesystem
WEKA implements a strongly-consistent, POSIX-compliant filesystem (WekaFS™) that allows all clients to share the same filesystems. This means any file written by one client is immediately available to all other clients. The system is formed as a cluster of multiple backends, each providing services concurrently, and it ensures data protection through an any-to-any redundancy scheme.
Advanced Architecture
The WEKA Data Platform uses a novel software-defined architecture that bypasses the kernel, achieving faster and lower-latency performance. It supports multiple protocols (POSIX, NFS, SMB, S3, GPUDirect Storage) and offers features like snapshots, clones, tiering, and cloud-bursting. The platform integrates NVMe Flash for high-performance file services and seamlessly expands the namespace to and from HDD object storage.
Virtual Metadata Servers
WEKA’s architecture includes virtual metadata servers that distribute and parallelize metadata and data across the cluster. This design ensures incredibly low latency and high performance, regardless of file size or number, and eliminates traditional metadata challenges.
Efficient Multitenancy and Autoscaling
The platform supports efficient multitenancy and autoscaling, allowing it to scale up or down to optimize performance, capacity, and cost. This elasticity is particularly beneficial for demanding cloud applications, enabling organizations to minimize cloud costs while maintaining optimal performance.
Use Cases
WEKA’s capabilities are tailored for various sectors, including:
- AI and ML: Accelerating AI training and inference workloads.
- High-Performance Computing (HPC): Powering HPC workloads for faster insights and improved infrastructure efficiency.
- Life Sciences: Managing unstructured data for research in fields like genomics and pharmacometrics.
- Financial Trading: Supporting high-performance data pipelines for financial applications.
- Engineering DevOps, EDA, Media Rendering: Optimizing data-intensive workloads across these industries.
In summary, the WEKA Data Platform is a powerful, AI-native solution that combines radical simplicity, epic performance, and infinite scalability to support the most demanding data-intensive workloads, making it an essential tool for modern data-driven organizations.