As the excitement from Nvidia GTC 2026 subsides—particularly around the announcement of its CMX KV cache extension to externally connected RDMA SSDs—we analyzed how this development might affect WEKA. Surprisingly, the company views the news as a positive development.
This stands in contrast to our initial expectations. We had anticipated that vendors like WEKA and Hammerspace—both of which have invested heavily in using local SSDs within GPU servers, via WEKA’s Augmented Memory Grid and Hammerspace’s Tier 0 software—could be outpaced or sidelined by competitors supporting the new CMX standard. Prior to the rollout of the CMX/STX framework, WEKA and Hammerspace held a distinct advantage: no other suppliers could match their speed in feeding data to these local SSDs, as doing so would have required developing specialized software.
With the arrival of the CMX/STX reference architecture, we initially assumed WEKA would need to modify its software to direct data to CMX-enabled SSDs instead of the local SSDs in GPU servers. Additionally, other Nvidia storage partners now have access to this framework, which levels the competitive playing field and allows them—such as Everpure and VAST Data—to close the gap with WEKA and Hammerspace.
Valentin Bercovici, WEKA’s Chief AI Officer, pushed back on the idea that WEKA would be at a disadvantage. He told us: “WEKA doesn’t have to alter our software for STX/CMX.”
The reason, he explained, is that both WEKA’s NeuralMesh client and server software modules have supported Nvidia’s Arm-based Grace servers since their integration with GB200 and GB300 systems. This native support eliminates the need for software overhauls to adapt to the new CMX standard.
On Grace servers, WEKA achieves 97 percent of line-rate CX-7 400GbE performance under real-world mixed I/O workloads. The company plans to soon demonstrate comparable performance with CX-8/CX-9 800GbE on Vera systems, further solidifying its performance credentials.
Nvidia’s BlueField-4 (BF-4) Vera-based DPUs—boasting roughly double the core count of their predecessors—will enhance performance across the three categories of container modules within NeuralMesh:
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“Drive” queue depth management
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“Compute” NVMe Fabric metadata and lock synchronization
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“Front-end” protocols (NFS, S3, SMB)
WEKA’s AXON is the implementation of its NeuralMesh filesystem software, deployed as containerized microservices on Nvidia’s GPU servers. This co-located architecture—where storage and compute services run on the same physical infrastructure—delivers low latency and high efficiency by keeping data close to GPU workloads. Bercovici elaborated: “CMX-based systems on new BF-4 initiators/clients and targets/servers will not only be backward compatible with AXON on today’s GB300s, but they will also give NeuralMesh more room to maximize WEKA’s performance in real-world scenarios, across a wider range of Vera-Rubin configurations (Kyber, Oberon, Ultra, HGX, MGX).”
“This will grow in importance as cluster-wide KV Cache routing and scheduling scales alongside upcoming LLM architectural advancements—such as Hybrid DiT, Mamba, and JEPA architectures—as well as DeepSeek 4-style engrams (conditional memory layers), which are expected to launch this year,” he added.
Bercovici further argued: “Even today’s preview of Claude Mythos, with its 10 trillion parameters, will eventually uncover new CMX requirements. The flexibility of NeuralMesh under large-scale load will benefit leading-edge labs that are pushing the limits of GPU memory demands.”
And he dropped a key reveal: “To put it simply—CMX will be one of our hardware platform offerings for the next version of WEKApod.” This aligns with WEKA’s recent focus on evolving its WEKApod appliances, which are pre-validated configurations for deploying NeuralMesh at scale.
Beijing Qianxing Jietong Technology Co., Ltd.
Sandy Yang/Global Strategy Director
WhatsApp / WeChat: +86 13426366826
Email: yangyd@qianxingdata.com
Website: www.qianxingdata.com/www.storagesserver.com
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