Latest Weka Features Extend Capabilities of Visionary Data Platform

By AIT News Desk On Dec 3, 2021

Delivers improved experiences and performance for AI workloads on premises and in the cloud

WekaIO, the data platform for AI, announced the availability of its latest version of WekaFS, the fastest storage for data-intensive applications that provides users with enhanced capabilities for cloud deployments and provides new capabilities for both cloud native and virtualized applications on premises.

“Other storage vendors often refer to their latest versions as an ‘upgrade’ or an ‘evolution’ of their products but that simply means that previous iterations were lacking or that the company was slow to recognize needs in the market”

Weka’s data platform, built on WekaFS, addresses the storage challenges posed by today’s enterprise AI workloads and other high performance applications running on-premises, in the cloud or bursting between platforms. One single data platform offers the simplicity of NAS, the performance of SAN or DAS and the scale of object storage along with accelerating every stage of the data pipeline from data ingestion to cleansing to modeled results.

PREDICTIONS-SERIES-2022 The additional enhancements now available with version 3.13 of the software provide customers with an even better experience by addressing modern workload demands, fully integrating flash, S3 object storage, cloud and on-premises in a single framework.

Among the top new features in WekaFS 3.13 are:

AWS Autoscaling Groups Thin Provisioning

WekaFS already supports AWS Autoscaling Groups to allow for easy, on the fly, scaling up of the cluster for peak demand periods and auto scaling down when not needed. For cloud-native applications autoscaling delivers the full flexibility of cloud elasticity by allowing resource instances to join or leave the group based on performance or user demand requirements.

New in 3.13, a filesystem can be set as thin provisioned when scaling the number of EC2 instances to be increased or decreased. When scaling up, as the NVMe capacity grows, these filesystems will get more NVMe capacity automatically added to them without additional user intervention. It also allows for shrinking the filesystem as EC2 instances are removed. This simplifies the entire storage management experience in AWS and works with AWS Budgets so you can track and take action on the cost of your dynamic AWS usage.

Remote Backup to Multiple Object Stores

Remote Backup is now generally available in 3.13, supporting the use of multiple S3 object stores. With 3.13, WekaFS’ namespace expansion can now attach to a second object store for snap-to-object data protection and cloud bursting purposes. Now, for example, a daily snapshot can be stored to a local object store, while a monthly snapshot is uploaded to a remote object store. An additional feature of the Remote Backup capability is that Weka can upload just the incremental changes between each remote snapshot even if there are other local snapshots, allowing for both reduced network traffic and reduced capacity needed in the target object store.

High-Performance Clients on VMware Virtual Machines

While customers have previously been able to have virtual applications run against Weka storage in the past, there were some tradeoffs that needed to be made. Now, it is even easier to use Weka FS reliably in a VMware environment. WekaFS 3.13 introduces support for VMXNET Generation 3 (VMXNET3), the most recent virtual network device from VMware. This allows for high-speed WekaFS operation with vMotion (vSphere) in a typical virtual environment. Just load the Weka client onto the guest VM and make sure a VMXNET3 network is attached.

CSI Quota

The Weka CSI Plugin provides the creation and configuration of persistent storage external to Kubernetes. At scale, customers have asked for ways to help control the consumption of storage in the Kubernetes environment. WekaFS 3.13 introduces CSI resource quota management to request volume size and enforce its limits via policies that are integrated in the plugin to allow for tighter controls and reign in unchecked storage consumption.

“Other storage vendors often refer to their latest versions as an ‘upgrade’ or an ‘evolution’ of their products but that simply means that previous iterations were lacking or that the company was slow to recognize needs in the market,” said Liran Zvibel, co-founder and CEO of WekaIO. “Because it was built for NVMe flash and cloud-native, Weka was designed to enable organizations to maximize the full value of their high-powered IT investments – compute, networking and storage. The Weka development model ensures that we continue to improve the product on a rapid basis and the latest features are an extension of our capabilities to better help users unlock the full capabilities of their data centers.”

WekaFS 3.13 is currently available for new and existing customers. Those looking to learn more or leverage the latest features are encouraged to contact one of the company’s Weka Innovation Network partners for additional information.

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]