Weka: Multicloud Data Platform for AI and Next-Gen Workloads

Weka unveiled the 4th gen of its unified software-based platform that delivers a consistent, performant and scalable data management experience across on-premises, edge, hybrid – and now multicloud – environments, for organizations looking to innovate and achieve first-to-market results with AI, ML and other next-gen workloads.

A seismic shift to the cloud by organizations looking to embrace digital-first strategies and harness transformational insights and discoveries using AI and ML is now accelerating, due in large part to the global disruptions wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent supply chain constraints.

“More than 90% of global enterprises are now actively moving to data-centric business models, necessitating greater flexibility and agility in the way applications are deployed and consumed across their organization,” said Eric Burgener, research VP, enterprise infrastructure, IDC. “To support large-scale analytic workloads, many organizations opt for a hybrid cloud environment and may also require access to multiple public clouds. This can present immense challenges when deploying performance-intensive applications like AI and ML, as traditional data infrastructures may be challenged to provide the required scale and data movement across distributed environments, resulting in stalled and even failed AI/ML initiatives.”

Weka is helping organizations to harness AI and innovate the future by running these impossibly large, performance-intensive workloads in the cloud – or clouds – of their choosing, as well as hybrid cloud and edge environments. The 4th gen Weka Data Platform delivers performance, data services and a seamless, simplified data management experience with economics – regardless of where their data and applications are located.

Key features and capabilities of new release include:

• Unified Multicloud Data Platform for AI and Next-Gen Workloads: Weka 4 provides native integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to give organizations a single, unified deployment option that performs consistently – regardless of their preferred location. Data replication features enable workloads to be stretched seamlessly across edge, on-premises, hybrid and multicloud environments, while security features provide malware protection without compromising usability.
• Class-Leading Economics: Weka 4 provides 3 overlapping ways for customers to optimize their environments for cost, availability, scale – tiering to local and cloud object storage, new choice of capacity (QLC) or performance-optimized (TLC) NVMe drives, and new, filesystem-wide data reduction that can increase effective capacity.
• Simplicity at Hyperscale:
  • Redesigned User Interface: Improves ease of use, streamlines recurrent operations, simplifies day-to-day tasks, and supplies the foundation for management in multi-tenant environments to help organizations better manage their data at scale.
  • Enhanced Multi-Protocol Support: Weka 4 introduces NFSv4 and Sever Message Block (SMB) support for high-performance MS-Windows workloads. Customers can condense their data infrastructure stack and replace many legacy systems with a single zero-copy, zero-tuning Weka Data Platform deployment.
  • New Software Packages and Pricing Options: To simplify the buying experience, the company is releasing 4 new software packages aligned to its customers’ primary use cases, with the option of subscription or consumption-based pricing.

“The world’s largest enterprises and research organizations are now doubling down on using AI and ML at scale to support innovation, discovery, and business breakthroughs,” said Liran Zvibel, co-founder and chief executive officer, Weka. “Hyperscale public clouds like AWS, Azure, GCP and OCI can provide the requisite agility and economies of scale needed to fuel these critical transformation and innovation engines, but the Weka Data Platform is the key to unlocking that value for AI/ML workloads in hybrid and now multi-cloud environments. Weka can uniquely help enterprises to avoid cloud lock-in and run their businesses with unparalleled economics.”