WekaIO, a startup specializing in cloud-based storage, emerged from a four year stealth period last week to unveil its latest cloud-scalable SDS platform, which the company are championing as the “world’s fastest distributed file system”. WekaIO claims that its new cloud platform, titled ‘Matrix’, has been created to undertake a wide variety of high-performance demanding workloads for customers of Amazon’s AWS and for those with independent cloud infrastructure.
According to the company, the Matrix platform bundles a networking stack to reduce latency, boost output and convey file system semantics more efficiently by using drivers integrated into its Linux kernel. With that in mind, Matrix will be capable of streamlining and executing data-intensive tasks like financial modeling, media rendering, bio-informatics, systems engineering, data analytics, scientific simulations, as well as a number of web-based applications.
Currently, the Matrix platform has been deployed at two undisclosed, large scale media and entertainment studios in the US, as well as TGen, an American genetic research company.
When quizzed on the functioning of the Matrix platform, CTO of WekaIO, Liran Zvibel, had this to say:
By doing basically our own real-time operating system and running our own networking stack and our own I/O stack, we were able to get software-defined storage to actually perform. The Linux kernel was never intended to be used as a base for a storage service.
Founded in 2013, WekaIO has its headquarters located in San Jose, California, but does most of its software engineering in Tel Aviv, Israel.