WekaIO updates its software platform security for mixed enterprise workloads

WekaIO, the leader in high-performance, scalable file storage for data intensive applications, announced updates to its software platform with advanced security functionality for multi-use enterprise high performance computing (HPC).

WekaIO has built the industry’s first flash-native parallel file system that delivers unmatched performance to the most demanding applications, scaling to exabytes of data in a single namespace.

Multitenancy allows enterprises to drive business profits by leveraging data across many different applications and groups and accelerating time to market. With this latest release of software, WekaIO enables IT administrators to provide high speed, secure data access to a broad spectrum of users and applications.

Until now, customers had to compromise on performance if they wanted to deliver secure multi-tenant environments for applications running NFS or SMB, as legacy parallel files systems lack enterprise features.

The latest software offers robust enterprise grade capabilities that deliver the best performance to a broad range of enterprise applications including HPC applications and general-purpose file sharing.

Highlighted enterprise features include:

• An extension of WekaIO’s simple, intuitive management design that will enable customers to operate in the secure multi-tenant environments they need: Directory services integration with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and Active Directory; support for Access Control Lists (ACLs) with multi-protocol interoperability between SMB, NFS and POSIX; the ability to set User Quotas for multi-user environments; and the ability to create multiple file systems for multi-tenant isolation
• Security enhancements that help ensure critical data is kept safe: Encryption at rest and in-flight across the network; authenticated mounts to prevent a rogue application from accessing the storage system; and PKEY multi-tenancy on InfiniBand networks for improved security
• Hybrid cloud data management: Snapshot to S3 cloud object storage for seamless workload migration, cloud bursting, archive, backup and disaster recovery

This latest release of software continues to deliver more performance while expanding enterprise capabilities. Earlier this month, WekaIO announced record-breaking performance on STAC-M3 “Tick Analytics” Benchmark for financial analytics and multiple enterprise applications—breaking 8 STAC-M3 world records for mean query-response times and 4 world records for throughput.

In addition, the WekaIO File System currently holds one of the top positions on the independent SPEC SFS 2014 benchmark and the #1 position on VI4IO’s 10 Node Challenge list.

“Enterprises are desperate for a file system that allows them to continue serving the diverse access management and technology needs of their stakeholders without having to compromise on workload performance,” said Barbara Murphy, vice president of marketing, WekaIO. “WekaIO now offers the most performant solution that is also secure, robust and operating system-agnostic.”

“We are seeing an increase in demand for a high-performance file system in environments with high velocity analytics workloads that want an alternative to legacy scale-out NAS where application performance at scale is a requirement,” said Michael Queenan, co-founder and director, Nephos Technologies.

“With WekaIO, we can offer our enterprise customers that have hundreds of different user types a storage solution that delivers single, shared access to their data with no compromise on application performance.”

“WekaIO’s scalable, high performance file system has applications in machine learning, genomics research, and high velocity analytics like finance, where I/O throughput at scale can exceed a traditional NAS system’s capabilities,” said Randy Kerns, senior strategist and analyst, The Evaluator Group.

“WekaIO’s participation on industry standard benchmarks allows enterprise IT managers to make the right storage decisions to support their HPC multi-user environments.”