WekaIO, the very fast file access startup, this week released the Limitless Data Platform. As far as we can see this packages old news under a new label.
Weka claims Limitless Data Platform is storage without equal, helping accelerate outcomes and improving productivity in the hybrid cloud. So-called key enhancements include Snap2Object now supporting snapshots being stored on-premises or in the public cloud or both.
However this snapshot feature was previously announced in March 2020, when Weka stated: “Weka’s unique snap-to-object feature allows users to easily create a replica of the production data and instantly push it to any S3 object store — on-premises or in the cloud — enabling snapshot-based replication.”
Other new features mentioned in this announcement are also pre-existing. For example;
Enterprise-Grade Security using XTS-AES 512 bit keys. This was mentioned in a blog by then CTO Andy Watson in October 2019.
Any Hardware: Weka can be deployed on industry-standard AMD or Intel x86-based servers supporting PCIe v4. AMD and PCIe gen 4 support was mentioned in a Weka and Supermicro document in November 2020.
Your Cloud. Your Way. Weka’s Cloud-Native architecture enables customers to dynamically scale up or scale down resources in the Cloud-based on workload requirements. This was mentioned in a 2020 ESG review which said: “The storage capacity can scale by adding NVMe SSDs to a server, by adding more servers with NVMe devices, or by allocating additional S3 capacity, and the performance can scale by allocating additional CPU cores or adding server instances to the global namespace.”
Weka’s Limitless Data Platform announcement did not mention a new version of its software. We’ve asked the company what is actually new in this announcement. Ken Grohe, President and Chief Revenue Officer, told us: “No new software. We are taking this occasion to showcase the 16+ features that we have delivered to the market over the last 8 months that have been hidden until 2/2/21.”
He added: “The brutal truth is that people still find us from speed, and buy us the first time for speed reasons. But their next 3-8 purchase over the next 2 years post initial deployment now are a repeatable and measurable 7-9 times the initial $$ and PB size deployments across NVMe tier, Object store, and Cloud as validated by the leader in autonomous driving, Life Sciences, and the US Federal Government etc and are expanding their Weka footprint for Simplicity and Scale reasons.”
