Scality RING becomes back-end object store for WEKA NeuralMesh

Scality and WEKA have a validated data storage system using WEKA’s NeuralMesh high-performance storage with Scality RING’s cost-efficient object tier.

NeuralMesh is SSD-based AI file system software that can run in Nvidia’s forthcoming BlueField-4 DPUs, supports key-value cache, and feeds file data at high speed to Nvidia GPUs. RING is Scality’s object storage, typically using hard disk drives. While MinIO and Cloudian provide RDMA-enabled object storage designed to feed data directly to GPUs – competing with vendors such as DDN, Dell, HPE, Pure Storage, VAST Data, and WEKA – Scality is instead positioning RING as a back-end object tier for WEKA’s front-end, file-based NeuralMesh via an object connector.

WEKA chief strategy officer Nilay Patel said: “WEKA’s NeuralMesh storage system delivers the high-performance software foundation modern AI pipelines require to run optimally. Enterprises that leverage the Scality RING lightweight connector together with NeuralMesh can achieve additional economic benefits, leveraging a cost-efficient object tier. This enables our mutual customers to achieve their AI project outcomes faster and more efficiently.” 

Scality says that compared to conventional S3 interfaces, RING achieved up to 10x faster performance on similar hardware in testing, with up to 20 percent lower infrastructure costs. Customers can “extend their NeuralMesh-powered AI and HPC data pipelines more economically while avoiding the management overhead associated with traditional object stores.”

Customers running AI workloads can mitigate SSD costs and shortages by using the disk-based RING as an exabyte-scale backing store, keeping new and active data on the NeuralMesh flash tier. Scality and WEKA say no engineering changes are required as there is “proven interoperability validated by WEKA.” All they need to do is “select HTTPS as the protocol from the WEKA config dropdown and direct the system to the load balancers fronting Scality’s RING.

Erwan Girard, chief product officer at Scality, said: “WEKA drives the performance; Scality provides the scale. Together, we help customers reduce infrastructure costs and management complexity while keeping their AI and HPC environments running at peak efficiency.”

The Scality RING with NeuralMesh Connector for WEKA software is available now. Check out more information here, with a downloadable solution brief.