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After this, there is no turning back: Funds flood in for Matrix-maker WekaIO

Fast filer swallows $31m

A $31.7m funding round has been closed by scale-out filesystem flogger WekaIO, positioning it for possible acquisition by a storage industry player.

Notably, some heavyweight tech firms were among new strategic investors in the round: companies like HPE, Mellanox, Nvidia, Seagate and Western Digital's Capital arm. Existing investors such as Qualcomm also contributed.

WekaIO's Matrix file system runs on commodity x86 hardware, pre-engineered systems from HPE, Supermicro and Western Digital, and also in the AWS cloud. It's used in high-performance computing, analytics, AI and machine learning, life sciences, finance and engineering. Matrix has wide applicability, in other words.

Weka will use the cash to expand its engineering and boost sales and marketing in international markets. The latest cash grab take its total funding to $66.7m.

The firm's Matrix file software has had a recent run of successful SPEC SFS 2014 benchmarks.

Late last year, Matrix also managed to provide 95 per cent of the Summit supercomputer's 40 storage racks Spectrum Scale IO performance using a half rack's worth of kit running Matrix in the IO-500 10 Node Challenge List.

Its current performance level, at least, has set Weka's software apart from existing fast-access parallel filesystem products such as Spectrum Scale and Lustre, scale-out file systems such as Dell EMC's Isilon as well as newcomers like Elastifile, Quobyte and Qumulo.

The storage desk at El Reg thinks Weka's ability to deliver generally applicable fast file access from storage arrays through network switches to servers with GPUs – and to do this, if we are to believe the benchmarks, faster than any other software – makes the firm a potential acquisition target for a storage player. ®

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