Hitachi Vantara joins WekaIO fast filer OEM fan club

Weka
Weka video

Hitachi Vantara has signed up with WekaIO to OEM the startup’s distributed file system and management software.

Update: Two HCP tables and HCP upgrade summary chart added detailing main offerings and HW specs. More detailed HCP performance data added. 16 July 2020.

WekaIO gives the company a higher level of performance that supports parallel access and native NVMe drive connectivity. Hitachi Vantara will tightly couple the software to its newly updated HCP (Hitachi Content Platform) object store.

The company reckons it can sell a Hitachi Vantara-Weka combo into artificial intelligence, machine learning, high-performance computing and analytics applications in several industries.

It’s all about speed. Brian Householder, outgoing head of digital infrastructure at  Hitachi Vantara, said: “Hitachi Vantara is helping our customers maximise their infrastructure advantage by delivering significant performance improvements when accessing and connecting their data to make faster and more accurate decisions.”

Hitachi Vantara has corralled IDC’s Amita Potnis, research director, Infrastructure Systems, for an analyst quote: “CIOs and IT professionals … are now looking at object storage to support new use cases and performant workloads. These organisations are also evaluating distributed file solutions to handle scale and performance to support high-performance computing, real-time analytics and AI.”

Hitachi Content Platform

According to Hitachi Vantara, traditional NAS, primary and cloud-native workloads are transitioning to object storage to meet high performance requirements. Object storage is generally disk-based and thought to be slower than file access to disk-based filers. However, MinIO and OpenIO have both shown that fast flash is a reality.

The scale-out HCP object system supports NFS and CIFS file access and tiers data to public cloud object stores. Weka delivers the fast file access speed while HCP will provide a virtually bottomless file/object store.

Hitachi Vantara said the HCP hardware update will better support next-generation unstructured workloads with performance-optimised, all-flash HCP nodes. These deliver 3.4 times more throughput over Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) protocol, resulting in up to 34 per cent lower costs.

Updated S Series storage nodes  have a more than 3x increase in small object read and write performance; as fast as 40,000 per second.

They deliver >2x increase in large object read and write performance. The HCP S31 node can achieve up to 8,600 MiB per second when writing large objects (100MiB). They enable nearly 3x more capacity in the same rack space than the previous generation and scales up to more than 15 PB disk capacity in a single rack, allowing more than an exabyte of data on-premises

Hitachi Vantara said an unnamed financial services company saw HCP performance improvements when using the flash gear of up to 300 per cent, with some jobs achieving 1,200 per cent improvement over the existing – and unidentified – traditional object storage system.

The data storage vendor claims “a typical Fortune 500 company getting a 10 per cent increase in data accessibility can see more than $65m in additional net income”. The source for this is a 2017 Forbes article which cites Forrester research.

Hitachi Vantara has not provided price or availability information for its updated HCP kit or its HCP-Weka combo offering. Read a datasheet for more information and a blog for more background..

WekaIO

WekaIO has developed a massively scalable and fast file system for high performance computing and large scale enterprise use cases. Cisco, Dell EMC, HPE, Lenovo and Penguin Computing are among partners OEMing, reselling or jointly selling its software.

IBM and NetApp are notable exceptions. IBM has its own Spectrum Scale parallel file system which directly competes with Weka, while NetApp sees no need to partner with Weka to get into HPC or into the enterprise AI market, which is a Weka focus.

Hitachi Vantara has its own basic or mid-range Hitachi NAS Platform file system technology, and the Virtual Storage Platform N Series which offers file services layered on its VSP enterprise SAN array