The joint bundles, which come with five sizing options, all at fixed pricing, also carry a $5000 bonus for a VAR with each sale to a new customer.
Today, WekaIO, which makes high performance scalable parallel file storage for data-intensive workloads, and San Jose-based ODM Supermicro Computer are announcing a new set of joint bundles pairing Weka software and Supermicro hardware, and specifically targeted at the growing number of enterprise AI opportunities.
Ken Grohe, President and CRO at WekaIO, which sells exclusively through channel partners, emphasized the growing scope of the AI opportunity for partners.
“86% of all respondent customers have a least one AI initiative,” he said. “Most tend to have two or three, and some as many as five.” While use cases vary significantly by vertical, recommendation engines, scientific visualization and image recognition were the most common.
This bundle between Weka and Supermicro reflects the two companies’ belief that their products combined are the best combination in the industry to handle these AI challenges
“The two of us are the best of the best in the NAS world, if you put the best attributes in and need maximum IOPS, low latency and huge throughput,” Grohe said. “The combined technology at Supermicro and Weka is better than the ‘Frankenstorage’ best in each category among NAS vendors – and Frankenstorage doesn’t EXIST.”
Weka’s Go-to-Market route is the server partners of their hardware partners. They are now in eight of the Fortune 50. Grohe said an order from a well-known U.S.-based retailer is imminent, which will bring them to nine. He also noted that Exon Mobil and Microsoft are now public references for them.
“Supermicro’s value proposition is having the broadest portfolio of optimized products,” said Matt Abreu, Supermicro’s VP of Sales. “That is what makes partnerships like this possible. We are always on the bleeding edge of the development cycles of Intel, AMD and NVDIA.”
“The day AMD Milan was announced in March, only Supermicro was on stage with a reference architecture that day,” Grohe noted.
“This is a best of breed partnership,” Abreu said. “We work with other vendors, although we don’t have these preconfigured solutions with them. The partnership reflects who we pitch first, and what we lead with.”
The new bundles – five in total – start with as low as 250 TB of usable capacity, and include 500 TB, 1,014 TB, 1,462 TB and 2,089 TB options. All have 200Gb/s ConnectX-6 network support, and 3-year 24/7 software and hardware support. The 1,014 TB bundle can cluster read 14.9 million IOPS, and cluster read 2.5 million IOPS.
“These are fully vetted, with best pricing, and all serviceable for hardware through Supermicro, and for software through Weka,” Grohe said. “These pre-allocated bundles are sold by Weka subscription, for the gift that keeps giving to the partner, and are only available through the VAR system.”
Grohe emphasized the importance of the pre-set pricing.
“With other vendor partners, we would wait 4 weeks to get a quote sometimes,” he said. “These are pre-priced and pre-allocated bundles.”
These bundles also come with a new customer bonus for the partner.
“Weka is sponsoring a $5000 new customer sale incentive,” Grohe indicated. Deals must be a minimum of a $50,000 order for the Weka component of the bundle. Registration of the deal also has to be done by the end of May, and the sale itself must be closed by the end of November.
While the bundles are being announced today, they have been available for several weeks, and are shipping now.
