'7 Minutes' with WekaIO VP of Marketing Barbara Murphy

**Editor’s Note: “7 Minutes” is a feature where we ask channel executives from startups – or companies that may be new to the Channel Partners audience – a series of quick questions about their businesses and channel programs.**

WekaIO’s Matrix software enables partners to construct a software-defined storage network out of a mix of commodity servers and SSD capacity, integrated with Amazon S3 or Swift, in an on-premises, cloud or hybrid setup.

WekaIO’s Barbara Murphy

“We are completely hardware-agnostic, to the point we don’t even require NVRAM,“ VP of marketing Barbara Murphy told Channel Partners. “You might have Dell servers one quarter, and the next quarter you buy HPE. That’s not a problem for us. We can mix and match. We just present it back to the compute layer as a single namespace. ”

WekaIO, which was founded in 2013 and officially exits stealth mode today, currently has a mix of reseller and OEM engagements, Murphy says. The value proposition for customers is a unified strategy as opposed to the traditional three buckets of storage.

“If you want low latency and speed, people tend to go for all-flash-type arrays,” says Murphy. “If you want simplicity and share-ability, scale-out NAS has been the platform of choice. And then if you want massive scale, cloud object store has been that platform.”

She says those silos have followed storage into the cloud, with Elastic Block Storage for high availability, Elastic File System for shared storage and S3 object store for big data.

“We’ve said, let’s solve for the three elements — speed, simplicity and scalability — with a single architecture that can that can satisfy all of your application needs,” she says.

Little-used data can be moved to the cloud but remain accessible. “We always maintain locality from the application perspective,” said Murphy. “So even if we’ve pushed the file to the cloud for storage because you’re not using it anymore, that application has this concept that it’s still local.”

The company has raised a little over $32 million in funding to date and has what Murphy calls a “very rich” patent portfolio. The executive team includes veterans of NetApp, EMC, IBM and Intel.

Currently, auto-tiering to the cloud is limited to AWS — where many customer proofs of concept are run — but Murphy says the company is working with Microsoft to enable Azure integration. Google Cloud is on the road map as well. Because there’s a reason enterprises are willing to pay a premium for dependable storage, WekaIO has tested reference designs on Dell and HPE gear and is reaching out to Lenovo, Quantum and other hardware makers.

“That just gives that extra bit of confidence to the user,” she says. “We also do a great deal of testing on the SSDs and have great relationships with providers like Toshiba and Micron and Intel.”

The technology is focused on HPC use cases — large enterprises with …

…DevOps practices, genomics, high-frequency trading, real-time analytics and fraud detection, media rendering — and Murphy says it’s well-suited to mixed workloads. List pricing is $10,000 per node with discounts for volume and customers that sign on for a three-year term.

“We charge on per-node basis; we don’t care how much capacity you have in that underlying node,” says Murphy. “And that’s because I think a focus on dollar-per-gigabyte makes us much more like a storage company than a compute services company, which is really how we think of ourselves.”

Partners with customers interested in decoupling the namespace from underlying hardware, and with open source practices, may also consider Ceph.

WekaIO Matrix 3.0 won’t ship with encryption, a shortfall for some customers, but Murphy says encryption at rest is on the Q4 punch list. Matrix does offer resiliency to four simultaneous failures, native NVMe support, a simple GUI and cloud-based support for analytics and application tuning, broad protocol support, multifactor authentication and the ability for partners to architect for various QoS scenarios. The software can run on bare metal, in a VM or container, or in the cloud.

In her Q&A response, Murphy mentions not charging for support. What does that mean?

“I guess that’s a bit controversial, but ultimately what we’re saying is we charge on an annual license basis,” she said, in contrast with appliance vendors that tack a 20 percent “tax” on the base cost.

“With us, it’s just a single node charge and that’s it, there’s no hidden charges,” she says. “It’s an all-inclusive single annual license, and I think it’s very simple and very clean.”

Channel Partners: Tell us what customers love about your product or service. What’s the secret selling sauce?

Barbara Murphy: WekaIO Matrix 3.0 has features that will help our partners target new markets and grow revenue from customers with AWS deployments. They include deployment in AWS, which allows users to run high-performance applications in the cloud or burst to the cloud and enables backup and disaster recovery. Unmatched performance at 30,000 I/Os per second and over 400 MB per second throughput — all at less than 500 microseconds of latency. It’s the best-performing file system in the world as measured on SPEC SFS, an industry-standard benchmark. A native NVMe performance boost with higher IOPs, throughput and lower latency. Dynamic cluster scaling that improves agility and enables IT to non-disruptively tune performance and capacity to changing workload demands. And a redundant network that offers a cost-effective way of increasing storage performance.

CP: Describe your channel program — metal levels, heavy on certifications, open or selective, unique features?

BM:  WekaIO makes it easy for partners to do business with us and to grow top-line revenue. No multiple layers of partnership to understand. WekaIO strategically limits the number of partners that we do business with; as such, there is very low competition. We focus on …

… resellers who have a vertical practice in the markets we care about, including financial services, life sciences, research and academia. WekaIO protects every registered deal, we offer high product margins, and every partner has high contact with WekaIO sales expertise.

CP: Quick-hit answers: Percentage of sales through the channel, number of partners, average margin. Go.

BM: WekaIO sells 100 percent through the channel or channel-assisted. We’ve recently emerged from stealth and already have more than half a dozen reseller and technology partners.

CP: Who are your main competitors, and what makes your offering better?

BM: Our competitors range anywhere from Elastifile, NetApp and IBM Spectrum Scale to EMC Isilon. WekaIO Matrix software runs as a service alongside other applications on any commodity Intel x86-based server. By contrast, all the above vendors sell dedicated external storage appliances and software.

We also have an integrated tiering layer that automatically and transparently migrates cold data to any AWS S3 or Swift-compatible private cloud for low cost and limitless scale — thus eliminating the need for legacy external storage. WekaIO currently delivers the world’s fastest file system performance. We are totally cloud ready, and you can run us on-premises, in the cloud or hybrid. Finally, we are software-only — you bring your own hardware. The storage market has many players, but we firmly believe that WekaIO’s performance, scalability and simplicity make it the most appealing company to work with.

CP: How do you think your technology portfolio will change in the next three years?

BM: Our findings show three major trends in storage: Flash pricing will decline dramatically, driving greater demand for shared accelerated storage. Data centers will increasingly adopt software-defined storage architectures. Scale-out file and object systems will be the primary repositories of unstructured data. WekaIO will continue to take advantage of this disruption and integrate enterprise features to meet market demands, and we will become an integral part of the cloud.

CP: How do you expect your channel strategy to evolve over that time frame?

BM: In the future, enterprises will require specialized expertise to execute on an SDS strategy, playing a key role in bringing together the various components: networking, storage, compute and software. WekaIO’s channel program and partners will drive this transition through strategic markets, such as enterprise, media and entertainment, finance, research and life sciences, and oil and gas. We expect that resellers will become services-first organizations and facilitate much of the work in the cloud, versus the traditional model of selling hardware.

CP: What didn’t we ask that partners should know?

BM: We are a software-only company and plan to continue that way. We do not charge for support and see that as the value-add that our reseller partners can bring to the equation. By contrast, every one of our competitors absorbs the support margin for their own bottom lines. I believe we can create a great new business model for the partner channel that allows them to participate in much higher-value business.