WEKA Launches New Software and Hardware Platforms for AI Inference

WEKA, the AI data and memory infrastructure company, is unveiling the third generation of its WEKApod Nitro, WEKApod Prime, and WEKApod Prime Max AI storage appliances—featuring custom-engineered chassis and patent-pending hardware innovations that deliver the highest performance and capacity density on the market.

Built to run seamlessly with WEKA’s new NeuralMesh 6 software, the systems deliver a unified AI inference infrastructure platform designed to help AI clouds, model builders, and enterprises scale production AI workloads while reducing infrastructure costs, footprint, power consumption, and operational complexity, according to the company.

The NeuralMesh software platform offers new enterprise-grade features, including native multi-tenancy, a unified file-and-object protocol stack, intelligent metadata-first data resiliency, always-on data efficiency with contractual performance guarantees, Kubernetes-native operations, and unified observability.

The new WEKApod systems were purpose-built by WEKA are poised to shatter existing rack-level data storage benchmark records and redefine every dimension of AI economics, establishing a new scorecard for inference-era infrastructure.

A single WEKApod system can deliver 1.1 exabytes of effective capacity in a single rack, with NeuralMesh data reduction running on a hardware foundation of 441.5 PB raw capacity, making it the first single-rack system to break the exabyte barrier. Throughput reaches 10.2 TB/s per rack. IOPS reach 210 million per rack, the company said.

To accomplish this, WEKA designed the system with a PCIe Gen 6 internal fabric, a cable-based, backplane-free drive interconnect, NVIDIA ConnectX SuperNIC networking enabling Spectrum-X Ethernet data plane connectivity, and a software-managed thermal architecture.

The systems have multiple patents pending for their innovative chassis design, underlying drive-interconnect, thermal-management, and serviceability technologies, the company said.

“AI infrastructure built for traditional workloads cannot power the inference era. The constraints are different: rack space, energy, supply chain, and operational density now determine whether AI deployments produce margin or destroy it,” said Liran Zvibel, co-founder and CEO at WEKA. “We built WEKApod to operate inside those constraints rather than against them, on hardware WEKA designed and engineered specifically for inference-era computing, with a supply chain we control. It delivers upfront economics that compound with the best total cost of ownership across the full gamut of AI infrastructure requirements, establishing a new scorecard that we believe every customer running production AI at scale will soon evaluate their infrastructure decisions against.”

WEKApod Nitro was built and configured for the most performance-critical AI workloads, where storage bandwidth determines whether GPUs run at full saturation or stall waiting on data. A two-rack-unit, four-node chassis offers four fully independent failure domains and 56 TLC drives, paired with dual-port NVIDIA ConnectX networking, delivering 800 Gb/s throughput.

“As AI workloads scale and datacenter utilization continues to grow, modern systems need to deliver more performance, more capacity and more efficiency without demanding more floor space or power,” said Jason Hardy, VP of storage technology at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking gives WEKApod 3 the high-bandwidth, low-latency fabric needed to keep the storage-to-GPU data path clear at scale, helping customers get more out of every GPU they deploy.”

Key WEKApod features and benefits include:

Custom-Engineered 2U Chassis: Delivers the highest performance and capacity density available on the market today in the smallest possible footprint. The same enclosure supports both four-node and two-node configurations.
Built on PCIe Gen 6 Internal Fabric: Delivers bandwidth headroom for every drive to run at full utilization simultaneously.
Micro Failure-Domain Design for High-Density Drives: A backplane-free environment creates fully independent failure domains and contains incidents to a single drive, preventing the need for cluster-level interventions.
Thermal Architecture Engineered for 35°C Ambient Operation: Software-managed NVMe power throttling under thermal stress means the system degrades gracefully rather than triggering shutdown.
Built-In Serviceability: Hot-pluggable boot drives delivered via a custom interposer with GUI-guided replacement. Mirrored NIC port layout keeps drive bays accessible during maintenance. A drive replacement is a 10-minute self-service operation, not a 2-hour maintenance window.
Headless Deployment: Cloud-driven rack-scale installations via NeuralMesh Home.
Configurable Appliances From Sub-1PB to 100PB and Beyond: The third-generation WEKApod Nitro, WEKApod Prime, and WEKApod Prime Max are the first WEKApod products sold as configurable SKUs. Chassis type, memory, drive capacity, and drive count are customer-selectable. Every configuration offers the same operational simplicity.

WEKApod Nitro, WEKApod Prime, and WEKApod Prime Max are available to order now through WEKA's worldwide distributor and VAR network for delivery beginning in Fall 2026. NeuralMesh 6 will ship with the first systems.

For more information about this news, visit www.weka.io.