EP21 – Discovering Weka.io, the world’s fastest filesystem with Barbara Murphy



In this 21st episode of the TECHunplugged Podcast we welcome Barbara Murphy, VP of Marketing at Weka.io. Weka was presenting at Storage Field Day 18 where Max had the opportunity to be physically present, and Arjan followed remotely thanks to the magic of the Interwebs(tm). Weka.io claims to have the fastest, most scalable parallel file system for AI and for technical compute workloads. We set on a journey to ask Barbara Murphy some questions right about that topic.

Podcast co-hosts Max Mortillaro (@darkkavenger) and Arjan Timmerman (@Arjantim) talk with Barbara about her background and about Weka.io.  It’s been a privilege for us to talk with Barbara as she delivered a truly mind-blowing presentation at Storage Field Day 18. Barbara has more than 20 years of experience in the industry with past C-Level leadership positions in marketing at HGST, Panasas and others.Show schedule:

  • 00:00 Presentations & Introduction
  • 01:15 The weka.io architecture – a software-defined storage solution
  • 02:47 The weka.io filesystem and supported protocols
  • 04:06 What are the most common customer use cases for Weka.io, and what is the adoption model? Are customers starting with AI/HPC and expanding weka.io usage to other use cases?
  • 06:10 What kind of storage media is recommended / supported with this software-defined storage system?
  • 08:30 Talking about the weka.io object store
  • 10:00 Scalability and performance – how to scale the filesystem, and is increase in performance predictable?
  • 11:52 What is the relationship between weka.io filesystem and other AI / HPC filesystems such as BeeGFS or GPFS?
  • 14:10 What is weka.io doing to stay ahead of the competition in massively parallel filesystems?
  • 16:01 Talking about Storage Field Day 18 and monster performance numbers
  • 17:42 Are benchmarks a truly reliable way to assess real world performance?
  • 19:18 Talking about weka.io partners, how can customers purchase the product and how it is licensed
  • 21:37 AWS was mentioned earlier, are cloud deployments supported? If yes, on which public cloud providers?
  • 23:35 How to install weka.io?
  • 24:40 Conclusion