welcome back to los angeles lisa martin here with dave nicholson day three of the cube's coverage of kubecon cloud native con north america 2020 we've been having some great comp live conversations in the last three days with actual guests on set we're very pleased to welcome to for the first time to our program shimon ben david the cto of weka welcome hey nice to be here nice to be here great to be at an in-person event isn't it no it's awesome they've done a great job i think you're green you're green like we're green fully green which is fantastic actually purple and hearts wake up yeah good to know green means you're shaking hands and maybe the occasional hug so talk to us about weka what's going on we'll kind of dig into what you guys are doing with kubernetes but give us that overview of what's going on at weka io okay so weka has been around for several years already uh we actually jade our product of 2016 so it's been out there uh actually eight of the fortune 50 are using weka um for those of you that don't know weka by the way we're a fully software defined parallel file system cloud native i know it's a mouthful and it's buzzword compliant but we actually baked all of that into the product from day one because we did other storage companies in the past and we actually wanted to take the best of all worlds and put that into one storage that is is not another me too it's not another compromise so we built the the environment we built weka to actually accommodate for upcoming technologies so we identified also that cloud technology is upcoming network actually exploded in a good way one gig 10 gig 100 gig 200 gig came out so we knew that that's going to be a trend and also cloud we saw cloud being utilized more and more and we kind of like bet that being able to be a parallel file system for the cloud would be amazing and it does how are you not on me too tell me tell us that when you're talking with customers what are the like the top three things that really differentiate weka speed scale and simplicity speed skills i like how fast you said that like quicker so speed sorry you see a lot of file system a lot of storage environments that are very um throughput oriented so speed how many gigabytes can you do to be honest a lot of storage environments are saying we can do that in that many gigabytes when we designed weka actually we wanted to provide an environment that would actually be faster than your local nvme on your local server because that's what we see are actually customers using for performance they're copying the data for their local to their local nvmes and process it we created an environment that is actually throughput oriented iops oriented latency sensitive and metadata performance so it's kind of like the best of all worlds and it's just not just a claim we actually showed it in many benchmarks uh top 500s supercomputing centers can talk for hours about performance but that's performance um scalability we actually are able to scale uh and we did show that we scaled to multiple petabytes we actually uh took some projects from scale-out nas appliances that actually got to their limit of their scale out and we we just continued from there double digit triple digits petabytes upcoming um and also scale is also how many clients can you service at once so it's not only how much capacity but also how many clients can you can you work with concurrently and simplicity all of that we from the initial design points were let's make something that is usable by users and not like so my mother can really use it right and so we have a very simple intuitive user interface but it's also api driven so you can automate around it so simplicity speed and scale love it so shimon it's interesting you said that your company was founded in 2016 in that in that time period because uh before jade ga ga 2016. um but but in those in in those surrounding years uh there were a lot of companies that were coming out at sort of the tail end of the legacy storage world yeah trying to just cannibalize that business you came out looking into the future where are we in that future now because you could argue that you guys maybe started a little early you could have taken a couple of years off and waited for uh for for the wave in the world of containerization as an example to come through but this is really this is like your time to shine isn't it exactly and being fully software defined we can always um adapt and we're always adapting so we bet on new technologies networking flash environments and these keep just keep on going and improving right when we went out we were like in 10 gig environments with ssds but we already knew that we're going to go to 100 and we also designed already for nvmes so kind like hardware constantly improved uh cpus for example the new intel cpus the new amd cpus we just accommodated for them because being software defined means that we actually bypass most of their inner workings and do things ourselves so that's awesome and then the cloud environment is growing massively and containers we see containers now in everyday uh use cases where initially it was maybe vms maybe bare metal but now everything is containerized and we're actually starting to see more and more kubernetes orchestrated environment uh coming out as well i still have a feeling that this is still a bit of dev property hey i'm a developer i'm a devops engineer i'm going to do it uh and it's there is i actually saw a lot of exciting things here um taking it to the next level to the it environment so um that's where we will show benefit as well so talk about how kubernetes users are are working with weka what is what superpower does that give them so um i think if you look at the current storage solutions that you have for kubernetes um they're interesting but they're more of like the let's take what we have today and plug it in right um so what kind of has a csi uh plug-in so it's easy to integrate and work with but also when you look at it um block is still being used in in kubernetes environments that i'm familiar with block was still being used for high performance so i i used uh pvs and pvcs to manage my pods uh claims and then but then i mounted them as read write once right because i couldn't share them then if a pod failed i had to reclaim the pvc and connect it to multiple environments because i wanted block storage because it's fast and then nfs environments was were used as read write many uh to be a shared environment but low performance so by being able to say hey we now have an environment that is fully covered kubernetes integrated and it provides all the performance aspects that you need you don't need to choose just run your fleet of pods your cluster of pods read write many you don't need to to manage old reclamations just to create new pods you get the best of all words ease of use and also uh the performance additionally because there's always more right we now see more and more uh cloud environments right so weka also has the ability and i didn't focus on that but it's it's really uh amazing it has the ability to move data around between different environments so imagine and we see that imagine on-prem environments that are now using weka you're in the terabytes or petabyte scale obviously you can copy and rsync and rclone right but nobody really does it because it doesn't work for these capacities so weka has the ability to say hey i can move data around between different environments so create more copies or simply burst so we see customers that are working on-prem throwing data to the cloud we see customers working on the cloud and and then we actually now see customers starting to bridge the gap because cloud bursting is again is a very nice buzzword we see some customers exploring it we don't really see customers doing it at the moment but the customers that are exploring it are exploring uh throwing the compute out to the cloud using the kubernetes cluster and throwing the data to the cloud using the weka cluster so there's and and one last thing because that's another interesting use case weka can be run converged on the same kubernetes cluster so there is no need to have even it's so in essence it's a zero footprint storage you don't need to even add more servers so i don't need to buy a box and connect my cluster to that box i just run it on the same servers and if i want more compute nodes i add more nodes and i'll add more storage by doing that so it's that simple so i was just looking at the website and see that waka was just this was just announced last week a visionary in the gartner mq for what's the mq4 distributed file systems and object storage talk to me talk talk to us about that what does that distinction mean for the company and how does the voice of the customer validate that great so actually this is interesting this is a culmination of a lot of hard work that all of the team did writing the product and all of the customers by adopting the product because it was in order to get to that i know we don't know if anybody is familiar with the criteria but you need to have a large footprint a distinguished footprint worldwide so we worked hard on getting that and we see that and we see that in multiple markets by the way financials we see a massive amounts of aiml projects containerized kubernetes orchestrated so getting to that was a huge achievement you could see other storage devices not being there because not not every storage appliance is is a parallel file system usually i think uh when you look at parallel file systems you you you attribute complexity and i need an army of people to manage it and to tweak it so that's again one of the things that we did and that's why we really think that we're a cool vendor in that magikarp magic quarter right because you it's that simple to manage uh you don't have any uh find you you cannot you don't need to find unity in like a bazillion different ways just install it we work it works you map it to your containers simple so we're here at kubecon a lot of talk about cloud native a lot of projects a lot of integration a lot of community development you've described installing weka into a kubernetes cluster where you know are there are there integrations that are being worked on what are the is there connective tissue between essentially this parallel file system that's spanning you say you have five nodes you have weka running on those five nodes you have a kubernetes cluster spanning those five nodes um what kinds of things are happening in the community maybe that you're supporting or that you're participating in to connect those together so right now you you don't uh we only have the csi plugin we didn't invest in in anything more actually one of the reasons that i'm here is to get to know the community a bit more and to get more involved and we're definitely looking into how more can we help customers utilize kubernetes and and enjoy the worker storage uh do we need to do some sort of integration i'm actually exploring that and i think you'll see some well so we got interesting so we got you at a good time now exactly yeah because you can say with with it with an api approach um you have the you have the connectivity and you're providing this storage layer that provides all the attributes that you described but you are here live living proof green wristband and all showing that the future will be even more interesting voting on the future yeah and and seeing how we can help the community and what can we do together and actually i'm really impressed by the the conference it's been amazing we've been talking about that all week being impressed with the fact that there's we've been hearing between 2 700 and 3 100 people here which is amazing in person of course there's many more that are participating virtually but they've done a great job of these green wristbands by the way we've talked about these a minute ago um this you have a red yellow or green option to to tell others are you comfortable with contact handshakes hugs etc i love that the fact that i am i'm sandwiched by two grains but they've done a great job of making this safe and i hope that this is a message this is a big community um the cncf has 138 000 contributors i hope this is a message that shows that you can do these events we can get together in person again because there's nothing like the hallway track you can't replicate that on video exactly grabbing people in the hallway in the hotel in the lobby talking about their problems seeing what they need what we do it's amazing right so so give us a little bit in our last few minutes here about the go to market what is the the gtm strategy for weka so that's an interesting question so being fully software defined when we started we we thought do we do another me too another storage appliance even though we're storage defined could we just go to market with our own boxes and we actually uh decided to go differently because our market was actually the storage vendors sorry the server vendors we actually decided to go and enable other bare metal environments manufacturers to now create storage solutions so we now have a great partnership with hpe with supermicro with hitachi uh and and more as well with aws because again being software defined we we can run on the cloud we do have massive projects on the clouds some of the we're all familiar with some but i can't mention um so and we we chose that as our go to market because we we are fully software defined we don't need any specific hardware for we just need a server with nvmes or an instance with nvmes and that's it there's no usually when i talk about what we need is as a product i also talk about the list of what we don't need is longer we don't need j bar j buffs servers ups we don't need all of that raid arrays we just need the servers so a lot of the server vendors actually identify that and then when we approach them and say hey this is what we can do on your bare metal on your environment is that valuable of course so so that's mostly our go to market another thing is that we chose to to focus on the markets that we're going after we're not another me too we're not another storage for your home directories even though obviously we are in some cases uh by customers but we're the storage where if you could shrink your wall clock time of your pipeline from two weeks to four hours and we did that's like 84 times faster if you could do that how valuable is that that's what we do that we see that more and more in modern enterprises so when we started doing that people were saying hey so your go to market is only hpc uh no all if you look at ai email life science um financials and the list goes on right modern environments are now being what hpc was a few years ago so there's massive amounts of data so our go to market is to be very targeted toward uh these markets and then we can say that they also uh push us to to other sides of the hey i have a worker so i might put my vmware on it i might put my i'll do my distributed compilation on this it's it's growing organically so that's fun to see awesome tremendous amount of growth i love that you talked about it very clearly simplicity speed and scale i think you did a great job of articulating why waka is not a me too last question are there any upcoming webinars or events or announcements that that folks can go to learn more about weka uh great question um i didn't come with my marketing hat but we we constantly have events and uh we usually what we usually do we we talk about the markets that we go after so for example a while ago we were in bioit so we published some uh life science articles um i need to see what's in the pipeline and definitely share it with you well i know you guys are going to be at re invent we do so hopefully we'll see you re-invent we're very in super computing as well if you'll be there fantastic i see that on your website there um i don't think we're there but we will see you we're a strong believer of of these conferences of these communities of being on the ground talking with people obviously if you can do it we'll do it with zoom but this is prices yeah it is there's nothing like it shimon it's been great to have you on the program thank you so much for giving us an update on weka sharing what you guys are doing how you're helping kubernetes users and what differentiates the technology we appreciate all your insights and your energy too no it's not me it's the product ah i love it for dave nicholson i'm lisa martin coming to you live from los angeles this is kubecon cloudnativecon north america 21 coverage on the cube wrapping up three days of wall-to-wall coverage we thank you for watching we hope you stay well