Weka Cements its Storage Leadership with Groundbreaking Performance and Latency Results on SPEC SFS 2014

Tests prove Matrix is indisputably the world’s fastest parallel file system

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Feb. 12, 2019 – WekaIO, the innovation leader in high-performance, scalable file storage for data-intensive applications, today announced the results of the independent SPEC SFS 2014 benchmark testing of its flagship WekaIO Matrix™ product; establishing Matrix™ as the clear industry leader for customers looking for high performance file systems with an excellent price-to-value benefit. Having established itself in the number one position for the SPEC SFS 2014 software build in January 2019, WekaIO has now posted winning results for all remaining benchmarks in the SPEC test suite. In addition to unbeatable performance and scalability, WekaIO has demonstrated extraordinarily low latencies across the benchmark suite, reaffirming Matrix is the world’s fastest parallel file system.

The recent SPEC SFS 2014 testing was conducted on a standard WekaIO Matrix-enabled cluster, utilizing commercially available storage server infrastructure. The tested storage cluster included six Supermicro BigTwin™ systems with Micron 9200 NVMe drives and Mellanox ConnectX 100Gb Ethernet networking.

The benchmark suite tested a variety of application types that stress both small and large file I/O and metadata including: software builds, video streaming, databases, virtual desktops and electronic design automation (EDA). In all application types, WekaIO Matrix was the clear front runner on both a performance metric and overall response time (ORT), a measure of latency. The following chart outlines the position relative to other contributors across the spectrum of tests.

Benchmark #1 Position Score ORT (ms) #2 Position Score ORT (ms)
Software build WekaIO 5700 0.26 NetApp 4200 0.78
Database WekaIO 4480 0.34 Oracle 2240 0.78
Engineering design WekaIO 2000 0.48 Oracle 900 0.61
Video streams WekaIO 6800 1.56 DDN 3400 50.07
Virtual desktop WekaIO 1600 0.48 DDN 800 2.58

“We know first-hand the great throughput and IOPs performance that Matrix delivers, because we use MatrixFS to accelerate our demanding engineering workloads and accelerate our time to market. And we are happy to be a partner to provide the network technology for the state-of-the-art storage solutions,” said Michael Kagan, Chief Technology Officer at Mellanox. “The technology and performance advantages of our ConnectX adapters and Spectrum Ethernet switches combined with WekaIO Matrix delivers breakthrough performance for storage services across a distributed shared network, achieving higher performance and ROI than legacy architectures.”

“We couldn’t be happier with these results, which underscore Matrix as the world’s fastest parallel file system offering the best performance density, and achieving the highest number with 60% fewer compute clients,” said Liran Zvibel, CEO and co-founder of WekaIO. “The high performance and low latencies achieved by Matrix are attributable to our customer adoption dominance in the demanding use cases common to technical computing. Engineering design is an explosive growth area in which breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and the internet of things (IoT) are transforming global production processes and generating vast amounts of data for conversion into business intelligence. Matrix shines in this area with its ability to accelerate data-intensive workflows while reducing storage complexity and cost.”

“WekaIO’s reported performance in recent SPEC SFS 2014 testing bolsters the company’s growing reputation as a leading innovator and an important company to consider in the expanding global market for advanced storage solutions,” said Steve Conway, Hyperion Research senior vice president of research. “SPEC SFS 2014 is a trusted benchmark not just for existing HPC workloads but also for emerging AI, machine and deep learning tasks that can create even bigger challenges for metadata IO and storage.”

WekaIO is a firm believer in the value of benchmark testing as a means to guide and inform development in the industry and frame results in a manner that delivers actionable intelligence to customers.

See the full SPEC SFS results: http://spec.org/sfs2014/results/res2019q1/sfs2014-20181218-00055.html

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.

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