 Welcome back to Los Angeles. Lisa Martin here with Dave Nicholson, day three of theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon North America 2020. We've been having some great 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, Shimun Bendeva, the CTO of WACA, 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 with this. You see people walking around. I think you're green, you're green like we're green. Fully green. Which is fantastic. Yeah, purple in heart, WACA, but fully green, yeah. Good to know, green means you're shaking hands and maybe the occasional hug. So talk to us about WACA, 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 WACA IO. Okay, so WACA has been around for several years already. We actually jaded our product at 2016, so it's been out there, actually eight of the Fortune 50 are using WACA. For those of you that don't know WACA, by the way, we're a fully software defined parallel file system, cloud native, I know it's a mile full 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 not another me too, it's not another compromise. So we built the environment. We built WACA to actually accommodate for upcoming technologies. So 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 us that when you're talking with customers, what are the top three things that really differentiate WACA? Speed scale and simplicity. Speed scale and simplicity. I like how Fauci said that. Like WACA. So speed, sorry, you see a lot of file system, a lot of storage environments that are very throughput oriented. So speed, how many gigabytes can you do? To be honest, a lot of storage environments are saying, we can do that and that, many gigabytes. When we designed WACA 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 to their local NVMe's and processing 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 not just a claim, we actually showed it in many benchmarks, top 500s, supercomputing centers. Can talk for hours about performance but that's performance. Scalability, we actually are able to scale and we did show that we scale to multiple petabytes. We actually took some projects from scale out NAS appliances that actually got to their limit of their scale out and we just continued from their double digit, triple digit petabytes upcoming. 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 work with concurrently and simplicity, all of that we from the initial design points 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 time period because. Before GA. GA, GA 2016. But in those surrounding years there were a lot of companies that were coming out at sort of the tail end of the legacy storage world. 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 the wave in the world of containerization as an example to come through. This is like your time to shine, isn't it? Exactly and being fully software defined we can always adapt and we're always adapting. So we bet on new technologies, networking, flash environments and 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 a hundred and we also designed already for NVMEs. So kind of like hardware constantly improved. 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 environments is growing massively and containers, we see containers now in every day. We 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 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. And there is actually a lot of exciting things here taking it to the next level, to the IT environment. So that's where we'll show benefit as well. So talk about how Kubernetes users are working with Weka. What superpower does that give them? So I think if you look at the current storage solutions that you have for Kubernetes, they're interesting but they're more of like the, let's take what we have today and plug it in, right? So Weka has a CSI plug-in so it's easy to integrate and work with but also when you look at it, block is still being used in Kubernetes environments that I'm familiar with. Block was still being used for high performance so I used PVs and PVCs to manage my pod's claims but then I mounted them as read write ones, right? Because I couldn't share them and 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 were used as read write many to be a shared environment but low performance. So by being able to say, hey, we now have an environment that is fully 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 manage all the reclamations just to create new pods. You've had the best of all words, ease of use and also the performance. Additionally, because there's always more, right? We now see more and more cloud environments, right? So Weka also has the ability and I didn't focus on that but it's really 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 R-sync and R-clone, 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 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 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 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 Weka was just, this was just announced last week, a visionary in the Gartner MQ for, what's the MQ for? Distributed file systems and object storage. Talk to me, 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 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 AI, ML projects, containerized, Kubernetes orchestrated. So getting to that was a huge achievement. You could see other storage devices not being there because not every storage appliance is a parallel file system. Usually I think when you look at parallel file systems, 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 and that's magic art, magic work, right? Because it's that simple to manage. You don't have any, you cannot, you don't need to fine tune it 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, are there integrations that are being worked on? What are the, is there connective tissue between essentially this parallel file system that's spanning, say you have five nodes, you have Weka running on those five nodes, you have a Kubernetes cluster spanning those five nodes. 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 don't, we only have the CSI plugin. We didn't invest 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 enjoy the Weka storage. Do we need to do some sort of integration? I'm actually exploring that and I think you'll see some interesting outputs. So we got you at a good time now. Exactly. Yeah, because you can say with an API approach 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. And seeing how we can help the community and what can we do together. And actually I'm really impressed by 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 2,730, 100 people here. It was 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. This, you have a red, yellow or green option to tell others, are you comfortable with contact, handshakes, hugs, et cetera. I love that the fact that I am 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. 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 give us a little bit in our last few minutes here about the go-to market. What is the GTM strategy for WECA? So that's an interesting question. So being fully software defined, when we started we thought do we do another, a Me Too, another storage appliance? Even though we're storage defined, could we just go to market with our own boxes? And we actually 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, and more, as well with AWS, because again, being software defined, we can run on the cloud. We do have massive projects on the cloud. Some of the, we're all familiar with some, but I can't mention. So, and we chose that as our go-to market because 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 as a product, I also talk about the list of what we don't need is longer. We don't need J-BAR, J-BAR, servers, UPSs. We don't need all of that. Radio rays, 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 that's mostly our go-to market. Another thing is that we chose 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 by customers, but we're the storage where if you could shrink your wall-cook 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. We see that more and more in more than enterprises. So when we started doing that, people were saying, hey, so your go-to market is only HPC. No, if you look at AI, ML, life science, financials, and the list goes on, 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 these markets. And then we can say that they also push us to other sides of the, hey, I have a worker, so I might put my VMware on it. I'll do my distributed compilation on this. 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 WECA is not a me too. Last question, are there any upcoming webinars or events or announcements that folks can go to learn more about WECA? Great question. I didn't come with my marketing hat, but we constantly have events. And what we usually do, we talk about the markets that we go after. So for example, a while ago, we were in BioIT. So we published some life science articles. I need to see what's in the pipeline and definitely share it with you. Well, I know you guys are gonna be at re-invent. We do. So hopefully we'll see you at re-invent. We're very excited. We'll be in supercomputing as well if you'll be there. Fantastic, I see that on your website there. I don't think we're there, but we will see you. We're a strong believer 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 crisis. 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 WECA, 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. It's not me, it's the product. I love it. For Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. Coming to you live from Los Angeles, this is KubeCon, South NativeCon, North America, 21 coverage on theCUBE. Wrapping up three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We thank you for watching, we hope you stay well.