EMC
Discussion of storage titan EMC, especially its efforts in the data warehouse appliance market. Related subjects include:
- Data warehouse appliances
- (in The Monash Report) VMware
Links and observations
I’m back from a trip to the SF Bay area, with a lot of writing ahead of me. I’ll dive in with some quick comments here, then write at greater length about some of these points when I can. From my trip: Read more
Notes on EMC’s Greenplum subsidiary
I spent considerable time last week with my clients at both Greenplum and EMC (if we ignore the fact that the deal has closed and they’re now the same company). I also had more of a hardcore engineering discussion than I’ve had with Greenplum for quite a while (I should have been pushier about that earlier). Takeaways included:
- This is starting off as a honeymoon deal. Everything Greenplum was planning to do is being continued. Additional resources are being poured into Greenplum to do more.
- Some Greenplum execs seem to envision staying long term, some seem to envision moving on to their next startups. The ones who envision moving on are, however, going to work hard first to make the merger a success.
- Greenplum has, for quite a while, had more of an advanced analytics/embedded predictive modeling story than I realized. Bad on them for not fleshing it out more in marketing and product packaging alike.
- Greenplum both denies the concurrency problems I previously noted and also has a very credible story as to how it will eliminate them.
Seriously, Greenplum tells of one customer that routinely runs 150 simultaneous queries – on what I think is not a terribly big system — and a number of POCs (Proofs of Concept) that simulated similar levels of concurrency.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, EMC, Greenplum | Leave a 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 |
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 | 11 Comments |
Quick news, links, comments, etc.
Some notes based on what I’ve been reading recently: Read more
EMC’s take on data warehousing and BI
I just ran across a December 10 blog post by Chuck Hollis outlining some of EMC’s — or at least Chuck’s — views on data warehousing and business intelligence. It’s worth scanning, a certain “Where you stand depends upon where you sit” flavor to it notwithstanding. In a contrast to my usual blogging style, Chuck’s post is excerpted at length below, with comments from me interspersed. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, EMC, MOLAP, Solid-state memory, Storage | 2 Comments |
Netezza has an EMC deal too
Netezza has an EMC deal too. As befits a hardware vendor, Netezza has an actual OEM relationship with EMC, in which it is offering CLARiiONs built straight into NPS appliances. 5 TB of CLARiiON will be free in any Netezza system from 2 racks on upward. (A rack holds about 12.5 TB.) In addition, you’ll be able to buy 10 TB more of CLARiiON in every Netezza rack, if you want. The whole thing is supposed to ship before year-end. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, EMC, Netezza | 2 Comments |
ParAccel unveils its EMC-related appliance strategy
Embargoes are getting ever more stupid these days, wasting analysts’ and bloggers’ time in doomed attempts to micromanage the news flow. ParAccel is no exception to the rule. An announcement that’s actually been public knowledge for a couple of months was finally made official a few minutes ago. It’s an appliance, or at least an attempt to gain customers for an appliance. The core ideas include:
- ParAccel’s usual shared-nothing configuration is hooked up to SAN-based EMC storage at the back end.
- Around half of the total data is on internal (i.e., node-specific) disks, mirrored on the storage device. The rest of the data lives only on the EMC device. Logically, all this data is integrated. So hopefully you’ll be able to process more data per unit of time than you could on a standard ParAccel configuration.
- Also, different parts of the EMC device are dedicated to different ParAccel nodes. So, while this isn’t a shared-nothing architecture, at least it’s shared-not-very-much. (DATAllegro does something similar, although without the mirroring on direct-attached storage.)
- Backup, snapshotting, and so on are inherited from EMC. Administration will increasingly be integrated with EMC’s.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, EMC, ParAccel, Parallelization | 2 Comments |
Positioning the data warehouse appliances and specialty DBMS
There now are four hardware vendors that each offer or seem about to announce two different tiers of data warehouse appliances: Sun, HP, EMC, and Teradata. Specifically:
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Sun partners with both Greenplum and ParAccel.
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HP sells Neoview, and also is partnered with Vertica.
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EMC (together with Dell in North America and Bull in Europe) sells DATAllegro. Now EMC is also entering a partnership with ParAccel.
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Teradata is pretty far down the road toward releasing a low-end product.
EMC is partnering with ParAccel
A talk about a ParAccel/EMC partnership has been promised for a forthcoming EMC user conference. Otherwise, ParAccel is exposing no useful information on the matter.*
*So what else is new?
The talk is called Highly Scalable Analytic Appliance Powered by EMC and ParAccel, and the abstract says: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, EMC, ParAccel | 2 Comments |