Data warehouse appliances
Analysis of data warehouse appliances – i.e., of hardware/software bundles optimized for fast query and analysis of large volumes of (usually) relational data. Related subjects include:
- Data warehousing
- Parallelization
- Netezza
- DATAllegro
- Teradata
- Kickfire
- (in The Monash Report) Computing appliances in multiple domains
Advice for some non-clients
Most of what I get paid for is in some form or other consulting. (The same would be true for many other analysts.) And so I can be a bit stingy with my advice toward non-clients. But my non-clients are a distinguished and powerful group, including in their number Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and most of the BI vendors. So here’s a bit of advice for them too.
Oracle. On the plus side, you guys have been making progress against your reputation for untruthfulness. Oh, I’ve dinged you for some past slip-ups, but on the whole they’ve been no worse than other vendors.’ But recently you pulled a doozy. The analyst reports section of your website fails to distinguish between unsponsored and sponsored work.* That is a horrible ethical stumble. Fix it fast. Then put processes in place to ensure nothing that dishonest happens again for a good long time.
*Merv Adrian’s “report” listed high on that page is actually a sponsored white paper. That Merv himself screwed up by not labeling it clearly as such in no way exonerates Oracle. Besides, I’m sure Merv won’t soon repeat the error — but for Oracle, this represents a whole pattern of behavior.
Oracle. And while I’m at it, outright dishonesty isn’t your only unnecessary credibility problem. You’re also playing too many games in analyst relations.
HP. Neoview will never succeed. Admit it to yourselves. Go buy something that can. Read more
Kickfire unlikely to survive
Following up on a previous report of Kickfire’s troubles — a Kickfire customer tipped me off that Kickfire told him they’re selling their IP and engineers, and the Kickfire products will be discontinued.
At this time, I have no idea who the lucky buyer is.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Kickfire | 1 Comment |
More on Greenplum and EMC
I talked with Ben Werther of Greenplum for about 40 minutes, which was my first post-merger Greenplum/EMC briefing. “Historical” highlights include:
- Ben says Greenplum wasn’t being shopped, by which he means Greenplum was out raising more capital and the fund-raising was going well. Note: Half or so of Greenplum’s deals were subscription-priced, so it had weaker cash flow than it would have if it were doing equally well selling perpetual licenses.
- However, joint engineering was also going well with, e.g., Greenplum CTO Luke Lonergan spending time at EMC facilities in Cork, Ireland. And one thing led to another …
- Greenplum has ~ 140 customers, vs. ~65 five quarters ago, 100+ at year-end, and an acquisition rate of 12-15/quarter last fall.
- A typical “small” paying customer for Greenplum starts with 10-20 TB of data.
- Greenplum Chorus isn’t generally available yet, with rollout energy being focused on Greenplum 4.0. Note: As important as it is for overall industry direction, Greenplum Chorus is a product which won’t be a terribly big deal in Release 1 anyway.
Highlights looking forward include: Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, EMC, Greenplum, Market share | 6 Comments |
Why analytic DBMS increasingly need to be storage-aware
In my quick reactions to the EMC/Greenplum announcement, I opined
I think that even software-only analytic DBMS vendors should design their systems in an increasingly storage-aware manner
promising to explain what I meant later on. So here goes. Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Solid-state memory, Storage, Theory and architecture | 6 Comments |
EMC is buying Greenplum
EMC is buying Greenplum. Most of the press release is a general recapitulation of Greenplum’s marketing messages, the main exceptions being (emphasis mine):
The acquisition of Greenplum will be an all-cash transaction and is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2010, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. The acquisition is not expected to have a material impact to EMC GAAP and non-GAAP EPS for the full 2010 fiscal year. Upon close, Bill Cook will lead the new data computing product division and report to Pat Gelsinger. EMC will continue to offer Greenplum’s full product portfolio to customers and plans to deliver new EMC Proven reference architectures as well as an integrated hardware and software offering designed to improve performance and drive down implementation costs.
Greenplum is one of my biggest vendor clients, and EMC is just becoming one, but of course neither side gave me a heads-up before the deal happened, nor have I yet been briefed subsequently. With those disclaimers out of the way, some of my early thoughts include:
- I wish my clients would never buy each other, but it’s inevitable.
- I don’t think anybody evaluating Greenplum should be much influenced by this deal one way or the other. (Whether they will be is of course a different matter.)
- EMC tends to run its bigger software acquisitions in a fairly hands-off manner. There’s no particular FUD (Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt) reason why this deal should stop anybody from buying Greenplum software.
- I also don’t think adding a rich parent adds much of a reason to buy from Greenplum. But if you’re the type who’s nervous about smaller vendors — well, Greenplum now isn’t so small.
- Greenplum Chorus could, in principle, work with non-Greenplum DBMS. That possibility suddenly looks a lot more realistic.
- The list of analytic DBMS vendors with an appliance orientation is pretty impressive, including:
- Oracle, with Exadata
- Microsoft, partially
- Teradata
- Netezza
- Now EMC/Greenplum, at least partially
- Weaker players such as:
- The ailing Kickfire, which a client (not Kickfire itself) tells me is being shopped around
- The reeling HP Neoview
- XtremeData, but I’m still waiting to hear of XtremeData’s first real sale
- Greenplum is something of a specialist in large databases. EMC has to love that.
- Greenplum’s weakness is concurrency.
- Greenplum’s “polymorphic storage” is a good fit for a storage vendor with appliance-y ideas.
- And finally — I think that even software-only analytic DBMS vendors should design their systems in an increasingly storage-aware manner, and have been advising my vendor clients of same. I’ll blog that line of reasoning separately when I get a chance, and edit in a link here after I do.
Related links (edit)
- Here’s the promised post as to why analytic DBMS need to be ever more storage-aware.
- Dave Kellogg crunched the EMC/Greenplum numbers, coming up with an estimated valuation range of $3-400 million, the high end of which is rumored to be correct.
- Merv Adrian suggests the big EMC/Greenplum loser is ParAccel, a viewpoint which presumably presupposes that the EMC/ParAccel partnership was significant in the first place.
- I talked with Ben Werther and posted more about Greenplum and EMC.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, EMC, Greenplum, Storage | 10 Comments |
Netezza’s silicon balance
As I’ve mentioned in a couple of other posts, Netezza is stressing that the most recent wave of its technology is software-only, with no hardware upgrades made or needed. In other words, Netezza boxes already have all the silicon they need. But of course, there are really at least three major aspects to the Netezza silicon story – FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array), CPU, and RAM.
- Netezza planned to be “generous” in its original TwinFin FPGA capacity, anticipating software upgrades like the ones it’s introducing now. It is satisfied that this strategy worked. More on this below.
- The same surely applies to CPU.
- What’s more, I get the sense that the CPU turned out in practice to be even more over-provisioned than they anticipated …
- … at least when one just considers Netezza’s base NPS software.
- However, I suspect that if the advanced analytics capability takes off, Netezza will determine that more CPU is always better.
- And by the way, NEC is making versions of Netezza appliances with more advanced chips than Netezza is. So if anybody should really, really need more CPU in their Netezza boxes, there’s a very straightforward way to make that happen. (And if there were nontrivial demand for that, appropriate support plans could surely be structured.)
- Everybody needs to be careful about RAM. Netezza is surely no exception.
The major parts of Netezza’s FPGA software are:
- Compress Engine 2. This is Netezza’s new way of doing compression.
- Compress Engine 1. This is Netezza’s old way of doing compression. It is being kept around so that existing Netezza tables don’t suddenly have to be changed or reloaded.
- Project Engine. Guess what this does.
- Restrict Engine. Ditto.
- Visibility Engine. This enforces ACID and handles row-level security. It is “sort of a corner of” the Restrict Engine (Actually, Netezza seems to waver as to whether to describe “Restrict” and “Visibility” as being two engines or one.)
- Miscellaneous plumbing.
If I understood correctly, each Netezza FPGA has two each of the engines in parallel.
Related link
- An August, 2009 post on what Netezza does in its FPGA
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Database compression, Netezza, Theory and architecture | Leave a Comment |
A partial overview of Netezza database software technology
Netezza is having its user conference Enzee Universe in Boston Monday–Wednesday, June 21-23, and naturally will be announcing new products there, and otherwise providing hooks and inducements to get itself written about. (The preliminary count is seven press releases in all.) To get a head start, I stopped by Netezza Thursday for meetings that included a 3 ½ hour session with 10 or so senior engineers, and have exchanged some clarifying emails since. Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza, Theory and architecture | 13 Comments |
Notes on a spate of Netezza-related blog posts
Fearing that last year’s tight travel budgets would hamper attendance, Netezza – like a number of other vendors – decided to forgo a traditional user conference. Instead, it took its Enzee Universe show on the road, essentially spreading the conference across eight cities. I was asked to keynote six of the installments.
After the first one, Netezza Marketing VP Tim Young took me aside for two pieces of constructive criticism. The surprising one* was that he felt I had been INSUFFICIENTLY critical of Netezza. Since then, every other conversation we’ve had about content creation has also featured ringing reassurances that Tim truly wants independent, non-pandering work.
*The unsurprising one was that I’d rushed. Well, duh. After months of telling me I had a 1 hour slot, Netezza cut me to ½ hour a few days beforehand. And my talk had been designed to be high-speed even in the longer time slot …
As a result, I accepted a subsequent gig from Netezza that I would barely consider from most other vendors. Namely, for this year’s Enzee Universe – June 21-23, aka Monday-Wednesday of this week, at the Westin Waterfront Hotel in Boston – I would do some contemporaneous blogging. The parameters we agreed on included: Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza, Presentations | 2 Comments |
Kickfire update
A Kickfire competitor tipped me off that he got 3 Kickfire salesmen’s resumes in 24 hours. I ran this by Kickfire CEO Bruce Armstrong, who confirmed that Kickfire has had a layoff, but gave me no further details.
Bruce also told me that Kickfire is now up to 10 paying customers, and that there are repeat deals.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Kickfire, Market share | 3 Comments |
Clarifying the state of MPP in-database SAS
I routinely am briefed way in advance of products’ introductions. For that reason and others, it can be hard for me to keep straight what’s been officially announced, introduced for test, introduced for general availability, vaguely planned for the indefinite future, and so on. Perhaps nothing has confused me more in that regard than the SAS Institute’s multi-year effort to get SAS integrated into various MPP DBMS, specifically Teradata, Netezza Twinfin(i), and Aster Data nCluster.
However, I chatted briefly Thursday with Michelle Wilkie, who is the SAS product manager overseeing all this (and also some other stuff, like SAS running on grids without being integrated into a DBMS). As best I understood, the story is: Read more