Western Digital and WekaIO Collaborate on NVMe Flash Platforms and Object Storage to Lower Infrastructure Cost in HPC and Machine Learning Environments

WekaIO, the innovation leader in high-performance, scalable file storage for data-intensive applications, and Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced that the companies are collaborating to deliver a fast scale-out architecture for data-centric high-performance computing (HPC) and machine learning (ML) applications. The expanded collaboration follows successful work between the two companies to address complex, next-generation application workloads, as well as a strategic investment in WekaIO from Western Digital Capital, the strategic investment fund of Western Digital, to accelerate the adoption of NVMe flash and object storage in the enterprise.

The enterprise market is hungry for NVMe to accelerate the performance of traditional HPC and ML workloads, making the collaboration between WekaIO and Western Digital advantageous for customers looking to deploy fast and scale-out architectures. Both companies are leading initiatives to bring NVMe technology to enterprise applications that demand low-latency and superior performance. This includes applications with a high concentration of data that does not get changed or modified, such as image recognition, stock market trades, geospatial imaging and text. These data sets are common in many ML and HPC workloads and significantly benefit from the performance enhancement of Western Digital's NVMe platforms, and the durability and scalability of ActiveScale object storage in a scale-out namespace. 

By enabling WekaIO Matrix™, the world's fastest parallel file system¹, on Western Digital's NVMe platforms, and offering a snaspshot capability to ActiveScale™ object storage systems, customers receive a fast and cost-efficient cloud architecture that helps move, protect, transform and extract greater value from data.

"We have been collaborating with Western Digital for the past two years on joint customer implementations, and the strategic investment firmly underscores the long-term potential our innovations offer the rapidly evolving storage marketplace," said Liran Zvibel, co-founder and CEO of WekaIO. "Our NVMe-native, parallel file system delivers industry leading performance to the most demanding data-intensive applications. Western Digital and WekaIO's joint solution delivers incredible economics driven by the right balance of high-performance NVMe flash and the highly-efficient cost of petabyte-scale cloud object storage."

The collaboration includes engineering and marketing alignment to optimize software-defined storage features that enable a tighter integration of WekaIO Matrix software with the Western Digital NVMe platform portfolio and the ActiveScale object storage system to deliver more innovative and cost-efficient solutions to market.

"Together, 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," said Phil Bullinger, senior vice president and general manager, Data Center Systems business unit, Western Digital. "This continued collaboration will serve to strengthen our combined proposition in HPC and machine learning, where datasets are massive. Together, WekaIO and Western Digital are well positioned to deliver incredible price/performance and value to the market."

Both companies continue to jointly create and sell solutions, including software, platforms, and systems. Learn more on how WekaIO Matrix™ and Western Digital jointly solve complex customer workloads today:

• Improving GPU Utilization for Autonomous Vehicles

• Fueling Growth and Discovery with the Speed of Flash and the efficiency of Private Cloud

About WekaIO

WekaIO helps companies manage, scale and futureproof their data center so they can solve real problems that impact the world. WekaIO Matrix™, the world's fastest shared parallel file system and WekaIO's flagship product, leapfrogs legacy storage infrastructures by delivering simplicity, scale, and the best performance density per U, for a fraction of the cost. In the cloud or on-premises, WekaIO's NVMe-native high-performance software-defined storage solution removes the barriers between the data and the compute layer, thus accelerating artificial intelligence, machine learning, genomics, research, and analytics workloads.

About Western Digital

Western Digital® creates environments for data to thrive. The company is driving the innovation needed to help customers capture, preserve, access and transform an ever-increasing diversity of data. Everywhere data lives, from advanced data centers to mobile sensors to personal devices, our industry-leading solutions deliver the possibilities of data. Western Digital® data-centric solutions are comprised of the Western Digital, G-Technology™, SanDisk®, Upthere™ and WD® brands.

Western Digital, the Western Digital logo and ActiveScale are registered trademarks or trademarks of Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates in the U.S. and/or other countries. The NVMe word mark is a trademark of NVM Express, Inc. All other marks are the property of their respective owners. Product specifications subject to change without notice. Not all products are available in all regions of the world.

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains certain forward-looking statements, including statements regarding the applications, benefits, capabilities, features and performance of Western Digital's Data Center System business unit product line. There are a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause these forward-looking statements to be inaccurate including, among others: volatility in global economic conditions; business conditions and growth in the storage ecosystem; impact of competitive products and pricing; market acceptance and cost of commodity materials and specialized product components; actions by competitors; unexpected advances in competing technologies; our development and introduction of products based on new technologies and expansion into new data storage markets; risks associated with acquisitions, mergers and joint ventures; difficulties or delays in manufacturing; and other risks and uncertainties listed in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recently filed periodic report to which your attention is directed. The company undertakes no obligation to update the information in this release in the event facts or circumstances change after the date of this release.

¹ WekaIO Matrix performance claims are substantiated by industry standard benchmarks that include the IO-500 10 Node Challenge and SPEC SFS 2014.