Western Digital Capital has made a strategic investment in WekaIO. The amount is undisclosed.
WD aims to increase penetration of NVMe flash and object storage in enterprises and WekaIO’s Matrix software is a door-opener for high performance computing (HPC) and machine learning (ML) workloads.
WekaIO and HPE have worked together on HPC deals since at least 2017. Phil Bullinger, GM of WD’s data centre systems business unit, gave out a canned quote: “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.”
Adding WD’s IntelliFlash to the mix and Western Digital Capital’s cash infusion will encourage more co-development with WekaIO.
Let’s work together
Western Digital supports WekaIO Matrix software running on its NVMe flash arrays with snapshotting to WD’s ActiveScale object storage system as a way of pushing into HPC and machine learning workloads.
Matrix is WekaIO’s performance benchmark-winning parallel filesystem software. WD’s NVMe arrays are the Tegile-originated IntelliFlash arrays.
WD’s OpenFlex composable systems connect to their components via NVMe over Fabrics, and the company also has an NVMe storage server in the UltraStar range. These could play a part in the WD-WekaIO partnership.
WD uses ActiveScale for big data and IntelliFlash for fast data. WekaIO and WD say some HPC and ML applications involve a concentration of rarely changed data such as image recognition, stock market trades, geospatial imaging and text. ActiveScale can store much of this data, and Matrix on IntelliFlash can serve it up quickly to HPC and ML compute cores.
