Hitachi Vantara is turning the tide on infrastructure in a new partnership with high-performance file storage specialist WekaIO (Weka) to tackle what they believes to be the most valuable, untapped asset in the data economy: unstructured data. 

The partnership marries WekaIO’s native non-volatile memory express (NVMe) parallel file system with the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) object storage portfolio. This will increase performance, reduce application response times, and better support next-generation unstructured workloads. 

During a media round table, Brian Householder, president of Hitachi Vantara’s digital infrastructure business, called this refocusing a transformation of scope and objective to become “much more of a data company.” 

While this does mean continuing to help customers maximize their data center infrastructure – what is historically Hitachi’s bread and butter – it also pushes the company to dive into the deep end of the “new emerging segment of IT:” modern enterprise data management. 

Legacy storage performance falls short on delivering insights from emerging workloads such as artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning, and high performance computing (HPC). These emerging workloads will soon be operational standards and it's difficult to retrofit legacy hardware. 

Weka’s strategy reimagines file storage for the data-driven era and the market is careening in their direction at a rapid pace. 

The California-based startup was founded by former XIV co-workers Liran Zvibel (CEO), Omri Palmon (COO), and Maor BenDayan (chief architect) in 2014, understanding the “fundamental limitations of storage platforms that were supporting new and increasingly performance- and data-intensive workloads,” according to a company blog post. 

Hitachi Vantara has seemingly caught a piece of a rising star. WekaIO saw 600% revenue growth in 2019, and continues to accelerate its growth in 2020. IDC MarketScape named the company a "major player" in its "File-Based Storage 2019 Vendor Assessment" two and a half years after WekaIO released its first product. 

Bringing WekaIO into the fold expands Hitachi Vantara’s digital infrastructure portfolio with an “accessible object storage platform” that, thanks to the newly added all-flash HCP nodes, lowers storage costs of up to 34%, according to the vendor. 

Patricia Harris, VP of global marketing for Hitachi Vantara, spoke briefly about the concept of data as the new oil. Harris drew a comparison between the value that is generated from these raw assets once they are properly refined. 

“While oil is available in ever diminishing quantities, the data universe is huge. And then track the unstructured data universe and it is absolutely huge,” Harris said. “What is great about this – but also creating a really specific challenge – is that [unstructured data] is growing exponentially.”

Over the next five years the amount of unstructured data is expected to triple, according to a Gartner report. Because data is exploding into both structured and unstructured databases, it has become harder to manage the speed at which data is being collected. Couple that with the dispersed amount of unstructured data spread across more locations, not just in the data center, but in the cloud and the edge, and you have yourself a mess. This is the present day data challenge and reality for many organizations.    

Companies today require systems for diverse data applications that can process growing amounts of unstructured data like text, images, video, and audio, making agile, scalable, and cost-effective storage platforms for ever increasing amounts of unstructured data a necessity – especially while enterprises continue to accelerate their remote workforces.