This content is part of the Essential Guide: Best data storage products 2017: Products of the Year

WekaIO Matrix

Startup WekaIO's Matrix parallel, scale-out file software pools the fast flash storage in application servers and offloads cold data to public and private clouds.

Bronze winner in Storage magazine and SearchStorage's 2017 Products of the Year Software-Defined Storage category.

Startup WekaIO launched its Matrix distributed file system in July, and within six months, the product captured the Products of the Year bronze award for software-defined storage. The parallel scale-out file software is designed to run on premises and in public clouds, pooling the fast flash storage in application servers and offloading potentially petabytes and exabytes of colder data to Amazon Simple Storage Service- and OpenStack Swift-compliant object storage under a single namespace.

Matrix scales performance by cores, and WekaIO claimed its distributed file system can significantly outperform NAS. Each core can deliver 30,000 IOPS and more than 400 MBps of throughput at less than 300 microseconds of latency, according to WekaIO. A 100-core cluster could deliver 3 million IOPS and 40 GB of bandwidth, the startup said.

WekaIO software deploys on standard, Intel-based servers or virtual machines and supports SAS and SATA SSDs and faster, NVMe-based PCI Express SSDs. The Matrix software includes a management console and networking stack that's designed to lower latency, boost throughput and convey file system semantics with greater efficiency.

The vendor's Matrix software ranked in the top three for innovation, performance, ease of use, integration and manageability among the Products of the Year competition's 11 software-defined storage finalists based on the average scores of the judging panel.

"Fast file system in hardware independent form factor -- what's not to like?" one judge said.

WekaIO GUI main screen
WekaIO GUI statistics screen

Pricing for an annual software license lists at $1,000 per terabyte when Matrix is deployed in dedicated storage servers.

WekaIO CEO Liran Zvibel, chief product officer Omri Palmon and chief architect Maor Ben-Dayan founded the startup in 2013 after IBM bought their first venture, XIV in 2008. The company maintains engineering offices in Israel. WekaIO raised $32.5 million in its first two funding rounds with investments from CID Group, Gemini Israel Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Qualcomm Ventures and Walden Riverwood Ventures.

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