ParAccel Unveils Scalable Analytic Appliance and Several Alliances
At EMC World yesterday, ParAccel, a provider of the ParAccel Analytic Database, announced a pilot program to develop with EMC a new fast, scalable analytic appliance with advanced availability, recoverability and manageability features. The Scalable Analytic Appliance will be based on ParAccel’s columnar, compressed, massively parallel relational database engine combined with enterprise-class managed storage infrastructure and industry standard servers such as those available from Sun, IBM, HP and Dell. “Columnar databases are more SAN-friendly,” Kim Stanick, vice president of marketing at ParAccel, told 5 Minute Briefing, “because they are less I/O-bound.”
The Scalable Analytic Appliance leverages patent-pending features that extend the ParAccel Analytic Database to use a blended and dynamically balanced scan approach to take maximum advantage of both server- and SAN-based storage. It will also leverage a new SAN-based approach for high availability and integrate tightly into managed storage control systems to manage backups, disaster recovery mechanisms, reporting and monitoring. “EMC approached us to develop this,” Stanick said. SAN is essential to mission-critical applications, she noted.
The pilot program is only one of a series of alliances and deals that Par Accel has announced recently. It has inked a deal with JasperSoft, a leader in open-source business intelligence, to make available JasperSoft’s Business Intelligence Suite for the ParAccel Analytic Database. Talend, a provider of open source data integration software, announced it will collaborate with Par Accel on joint sales opportunities and marketing initiatives. And ParAccel, has entered into an OEM agreement with IBM, in which it will embed IBM InfoSphere Change Data Capture within the ParAccel Analytic Database, providing ParAccel customers with seamless and real-time updates from heterogeneous databases, including IBM DB2, Oracle, and Microsoft’s SQL Server. “Having these partners means a lot to us,” Stanick said.
The pilot program for early access customers is available beginning on June 1. Companies interested in the pilot program can apply online here. For more information, go here.
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Netezza Announces Compress Engine and OEM Deal with EMC
Netezza, a leader in data warehouse and analytic appliances, has unveiled what it calls its Compress Engine functionality, which will double the speed of its high-performance data warehouse appliance while reducing the data footprint by up to four times. Initially announced last December, the Compress Engine is now available as part of Release 4.5 of the Netezza appliance. “We now have full distribution and have added a sixth engine to the framework,” Phil Francisco, vice president of product marketing and management at Netezza, told 5 Minute Briefing.
Netezza’s Compress Engine is designed primarily for performance improvement, and not merely to reduce data sizes and system footprints. It employs a patent-pending method for compiling columnar data in all tables of the database, allowing the Netezza appliance to compress the data to use disk much more effectively, greatly increasing query performance as data streams from the disk.
Compress Engine is part of the Netezza’s FPGA-Accelerated Streaming Technology (FAST) Engines framework, the foundation of its patented streaming architecture. “We anticipated the Compress Engine a year and a half ago as a part of this framework,” Francisco said.
In separate announcements, yesterday at EMC World, Netezza announced an OEM agreement with EMC in which it will combine the EMC CLARiiON AX4 network storage array into the Netezza Performance Server data warehouse appliance to deliver configurations that address enterprise operational demands, yet require no increase in Netezza system or data center footprint. These configurations will deliver near-line storage capacity and data staging capability for loading, backup and disaster recovery activities, allowing customers to stage large-scale data movement operations at the most optimal or efficient time.
Finally, Netezza has launched a new online community to make it easier for its members to connect to share ideas and express opinions. Known as “enzees,” community members include over 1,000 Netezza customers, partners, developers, prospective customers, industry analysts and other constituents worldwide. For more information about the Netezza FAST Engine’s framework and Compress Engine, visit Netezza’s blog posting here. For more on the Netezza/EMC partnership, go here. For more information about Netezza, go here.
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Sybase Offers Extreme Analytics with New Appliance
Sybase, a provider of enterprise infrastructure, mobile software and mobile services, has announced the new Sybase Analytic Appliance, configured and tuned to provide extreme analytics and alleviate overburdened enterprise data warehouses, data marts and reporting systems.
“We find that customers are asking for appliances because they want something that they can quickly deploy, that they can easily manage, and that is affordable, yet gives them not only the price but also the performance that they are looking for,” David Jacobson, senior director of product marketing for Sybase, told 5 Minute Briefing. “From those three key challenges we have built an appliance we think meets all of those requirements for customers and provides them a superior value over our competition.”
The appliance, which combines Sybase IQ, Sybase PowerDesigner, IBM Power Systems and MicroStrategy 8, has the benefits of a custom-built enterprise data warehouse (EDW), and is up to one third of the price of other leading solutions, according to Sybase. Affordability has jumped to the top of the requirements list as customers look at how they have to tighten their IT budgets over the next year due to economic circumstances, Jacobson observed. “One of our principal value propositions for this product is that we are between a half to a third of the price of Netezza and Teradata. We think that that really provides some compelling value to our customers,” Jacobson said.
Sybase Analytic Appliance on IBM Power Systems provides a unified appliance console, pre-configured hardware, software and storage in one power-efficient unit. The vendor adds that the appliance requires lower initial and ongoing investment because, unlike its traditional row-based and parallel-computing counterparts, stored data in column-oriented Sybase IQ is compressed by up to 70 percent of its input size. In addition, Sybase Analytic Appliance does not require labor-intensive index tuning, reducing overall maintenance costs; and its point-and-click console is also intended to simplify appliance administration and monitoring.
It is a complete end-to-end appliance, Jacobson emphasized. “We deliver it all with single-vendor support,” he said. Sybase Analytic Appliance is sold and supported by systems integrator mLogica, an expert on IBM hardware, Sybase software and MicroStrategy business intelligence software. Customers want to have one company that can architect it for them, can do design and development and installation work, and help them with any kind of performance and tuning, said Jacobson.
Sybase Analytic Appliance - Early Adopter Edition is available now. Three editions, including Starter, Standard and Enterprise, depending on customer requirements, will be generally available this summer. For more information, go here.
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Vertica Unveils Analytic Database for the Cloud
Vertica, the developer of a grid-based, column-oriented analytic database technology, has debuted the Vertica Analytic Database for the Cloud, a new, on-demand version of its grid-enabled columnar database hosted on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). The new pay-as-you-go offering enables companies to create large, high-performance analytic data marts without upfront data center costs and delays. Vertica for the Cloud completely changes the economics of business analytics, making it economically feasible to rapidly initiate a much broader spectrum of analytic projects and businesses. “This will change the way that people can access analytic databases,” Andy Ellicott, senior director of marketing, told 5 Minute Briefing. “This is the first analytic database offered on an on-demand basis.”
Cloud computing is a new paradigm that gives companies the benefits of hosted software - applications, servers, security, networking and storage running on a virtual grid computing environment managed by a third party. The cloud scales on-demand - additional servers are added to a user’s cluster as workloads demand. Vertica for the Cloud is the only analytic database designed to be as elastic as the cloud. Its shared-nothing architecture, aggressive data compression and grid-based failover and recovery make it uniquely suited to process terabytes of data fast and economically on a 24x7 basis. “The sky is the limit,” Omer Trajman, director of field engineering, told 5 Minute Briefing. “In the cloud, the database is ready in minutes. There are no servers to install. We don’t know where people will go in the cloud.”
Because there are no long-term financial commitments required, lines of business can pay monthly Vertica for the Cloud usage fees out of the operating expense budgets they control rather than going through lengthy capital expenditure approval processes. Companies can fund departmental, proof of concept and ad hoc analytic data marts on-demand, gaining the business agility to respond to analytic requirements faster than the competition.
To sign up and have a fully provisioned analytic database ready for data loading and querying within minutes, go here. Vertica and Amazon are working together to promote cloud-based analytic data management with Vertica Analytic Database for the Cloud. On the two companies are co-sponsoring a Webinar entitled “Analytic Data Management in the Cloud with Vertica and Amazon Web Services,” May 22 at 2 p.m. EDT. During the Webinar, a live demonstration of the database will be presented. To sign up for the Webinar, go here.
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InetSoft Releases Style Intelligence 9.5 for Enhanced Operational Business Intelligence
InetSoft Technology, a provider of reporting and analysis solutions, has announced the release of Style Intelligence 9.5 software. The BI offering includes the Style Report engine, Data Block technology, the latest in Flex and in-memory techniques, and allows user-defined data mashups to be explored in dashboards and presented in reports.
Most of the work for the new release has been done on the back end, “so all the user will see is faster response time,” Byron Igoe, engagement manager at InetSoft Technology, told 5 Minute Briefing. “The impact to what the user sees and can do is relatively minor but the performance leap, depending on what you measure, is anywhere from 25 percent faster to 5 times faster.”
New features in the 9.5 version include a Flex Interface “which means a smaller footprint and a lot quicker response times for users,” said Igoe. Additionally, with “embedded materialized views,” data mashups can now utilize scheduled pre-aggregation, regardless of original source, making analysis of complex datasets as rapid as those from a single database. Additionally, utilizing in-memory technology, memory resident bitmap indexing can be used for quickly analyzing very large data volumes.
Creating a custom dashboard layout with Web 2.0 drag and drop, users can select and arrange their KPIs, and the final dashboard is JSR-168 and WSRP compatible, according to the vendor. Additional improvements include minor enhancements in the areas of incremental deployment, ad hoc reporting, and localization. For more information, go here.
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