• HP hired a software guy, Leo Apotheker, as CEO, and a software guy with a liking for high-end services, Ray Lane, as chairman. Now a Leo Apotheker conference call suggests HP will increase its emphasis on software, and maybe high-end services as well. No surprise. The article suggests, however,  that HP at this point has no clear strategy along these lines. That’s no surprise either.
  • And then there’s Sarah Lacy’s take, of which the interesting part reads “Separately, Andreessen has said that he thinks enterprise software is ripe for disruption and his firm is going to fund a new generation of Oracle-killers.”
  • I added more on Ray Lane’s tenure at Oracle over on Software Memories.
• Netezza had a falling out with its original supplier of geospatial technology, Intelligent Integration Systems (IISi), and a lawsuit ensued over alleged copying. Now ISSi has upped the stakes, essentially alleging that Netezza’s new geospatial software doesn’t work, and that hence the CIA (evidently a Netezza user) is killing the wrong people via drone strikes. Netezza has wisely selected from its short list of acceptable responses, including versions of:
  • “All our classified customers are happy, and if we told you anything more than that, that would kind of defeat the purpose of being classified, wouldn’t it?”
  • “Copy, schmopy. A polygon is a polygon, and has been since Euclid.”
  • “We don’t have no steenking bugs.”
• OCZ, whoever they are, are trying to offer solid-state drives with PCIe-like bandwidth, which makes sense in that most observers except Teradata think the SAS interface isn’t fast enough for solid-state.
• Speaking of Teradata, I’d been wondering somewhat as to why they just shut down Kickfire’s product line after acquiring its assets. Well, somebody who tested a Kickfire box told me that — great TPC-H results notwithstanding — it turned out not to be nearly as fast as one might think, on real-life data sets that didn’t fit entirely into RAM. Hard though such a thing may be to imagine, it turns out that Kickfire’s TPC-H results were yet less significant than I thought they were.
• I haven’t been looking at High Scalability nearly as much as I should, and that’s an understatement. It’s an outstanding blog.
• A couple of Google execs offered some predictions about the future of online advertising, which might be of interest to anybody selling analytic (or text analytic) technology to the online/digital media market.
• The BBC shows us what a single 133-character tweet plus its metadata look like in JSON. (All 1582 characters.)
• Huffington Post’s CEO made some comments about influencers which are additive to what I’ve been saying about influencers over on Strategic Messaging. (If you don’t read that — well, it’s my blog about marketing.)
  
• Speaking of my other blogs, I’m not bothering to put up a separate post like this over on Text Technologies, where thee posts I have put up recently tend to be (at least by my standards) relatively link-heavy anyway, but I have a couple more to share even so:
  • Paul Carr’s 7 rules for TechCrunch/AOL employees are really funny.
  • Some major search engine marketing experts are sounding defeatist about web spam.

The immediate hook here is that I had a short conversation with Scott Gnau of Teradata yesterday, triggered by Teradata’s acquisition of Kickfire’s assets. Takeaways from that part included:

• The acquisition is all about Kickfire’s data pipelining technology.
• Scott (in my opinion rightly) thinks that isn’t particularly tied to Kickfire’s choice of particular DBMS architecture (fairly vanilla columnar).
• No decision has been made about whether the right vehicle for this technology is an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array), conventional Intel CPU, RAM, etc.

If you want to handicap Teradata’s future data pipelining strategy, you might note that:

• Kickfire’s own choice – and hence its existing implementation – is an FPGA.
• VectorWise’s approach to pipelining is Intel-based, apparently at the cost of being closely tied to specific generations of Intel CPUs.
• XtremeData’s approach to pipelining is FPGA-based.
• Teradata has a lot more development resources than any of those other companies, as well as important existing products, and hence has both means and motive to shoehorn new technology into older system designs.

While I had Scott on the phone, I brought up a few other subjects too. Highlights included:

• Teradata’s Flash-based appliance is doing just fine in beta test and customer POCs (Proofs of Concept).
• Other kinds of Teradata appliance are not inconceivable.
• Scott thinks Michael McIntire’s condemnation of Active-Active architectures is overstated. That said,
  • Scott does acknowledge a need for greater Active-Active scalability, and suggests that the reason Xkoto’s current products are being discontinued is their lack of scaling.
  • Scott seems quietly confident the scaling will get done.
• Scott is emphatic that Teradata is not going to go to a two-tier architecture. In particular, the point of splitting storage/lightweight database processing and heavyweight database processing on separate tiers is generally to save bandwidth, and Teradata’s BYNET is typically less than 10% loaded.
• Scott didn’t dispute my claim that this all suggests Teradata Virtual Storage is the future, at the expense of a rigid delineation among specific use-case-focused product lines.
• Unlike Netezza or Aster, Teradata doesn’t seem to plan analytic capability that works outside the UDF (User Defined Function) framework. However, Scott noted that Teradata has long had the capability that Aster and Netezza now also have of letting you run analytic code either in “protected mode” (if the process fails the whole database doesn’t crash) or in the database kernel (best performance, if you’re sufficiently confident in the code’s stability to take the risk). Scott also spoke of the release later this quarter of Teradata FastPath, which will offer yet better performance (however, there’s a gotcha to Teradata FastPath that’s still NDA).

Putting all that together with the rest of what we know about Teradata, I’m going to call out three pillars of Teradata’s long-term product strategy:

• Same fundamentals as always. Teradata’s core product strategy is:
  • Single DBMS, capable of meeting all analytic needs while running in a single instance, usually running on …
  • … proprietary hardware …
  • … built from conservatively-chosen parts.
• Selective vertical application stack. No matter how horizontally-oriented they are, many companies that have been in the analytic technology business for a while wind up with some vertical applications. It sort of just happens. Teradata is no exception. Teradata also likes to sell services to its product customers, and some of those are quite vertical-aware.
• Mutable, modular platform. This is what I highlighted above. Note that it’s philosophically attuned with the one-system-does-everything approach Teradata prefers. More subtly, please also note that it goes well with customer-by-customer price customization, which is almost a must for Teradata given the Innovator’s Dilemma kind of pricing box it finds itself in.

So far, that’s not too exciting, except in the details of how Teradata’s engineers make that all work. But there’s a fourth pillar to Teradata’s technical strategy as well, and it’s a wild card: tight partnerships. Every time I talk with Teradata hardware chief Carson Schmidt, he seems excited about some particular version of a part or other – sometimes from a reasonably established vendor (once it was LSI Logic), sometimes from a tiny one (notably the “stealth” start-up on which Teradata bet its first solid-state product.) In the future, I expect tight business intelligence partnerships as well. Cognos BI will be increasingly integrated with IBM’s DBMS and hardware; Business Objects’ BI will increasingly be integrated with SAP’s applications; and Oracle’s BI will eventually be integrated with everything. How do you compete with that if you‘re Microstrategy? Well, you try to have superior product, of course – but you also partner as closely with DBMS vendors as you can, an approach Microstrategy has already started. Predictive analytics stalwart SAS, of course, is on a partnership binge as well.

Teradata has a larger installed base than almost all its competitors, and enjoys richer third-party software and service support as a result. But I suspect that going forward, for Teradata to remain a leading competitor at price points it is willing to accept, Teradata’s “ecosystem” advantages will need to ratchet up one or several notches.

• Aster Data showed me a lot of customer names and deal sizes, across a bunch of industries (mainly enterprise rather than web). Yes, Aster’s market success is for real. (But almost all those details are NDA.)
• Sybase’s product plans for IQ are pretty impressive. (But the most interesting parts are, you guessed it, NDA.)
• I’ve kissed and made up* with ParAccel, now that they’ve replaced their CEO, replaced their marketing chief, and stopped the worst of the marketing nonsense I used to complain about. ParAccel has some interesting plans for ParAccel 3.0 which are, naturally, NDA.
• The Peoplesoft guys are doing it over again at Workday. Only this time, their platform isn’t a relational DBMS. Rather, it’s an in-memory, completely object-oriented data model, with disk used only on a “Just in case the power ever goes out” basis. (Thankfully, nothing at all about our conversation was NDA.)
• I’m finally feeling good about Northscale’s memcached-compatible persistent store Membase. The main reason is that they showed me a near-term path to interfaces that are richer than key-value. Also, Todd Hoff reassured me that even pure persistent memcached has a place.
• Rumor says that even the one app for which Facebook was using Cassandra — in-box search — has been decommissioned. On the other hand, numerous other scale-0ut DBMS (SQL or otherwise) seem to have Facebook footholds. But details are — all together now! — NDA.

*If you know ParAccel’s new marketing exec Michael Weir, you surely guessed I mean that only in a figurative sense.

From elsewhere:

• Daniel Abadi offered his analysis of Kickfire’s demise. In general I agree, but Daniel neglected to mention one hugely important factor — the chicken-egg negative effect of Kickfire’s lack of market or marketing traction. Customers were extremely reluctant to buy from Kickfire because they perceived, correctly, that Kickfire’s survivability was far from assured.
• While the InfiniDB forums suggest that there are at least a couple of production users of Calpont’s free InfiniDB, Calpont seemingly has a long way to go to be even as successful as Kickfire. But Calpont does have a bit of money to spend on lead generation; maybe some day they’ll even have actual customers.
• In a response to a question I messaged over, XtremeData tells me they have actual customers now. Press releases to follow.
• The admiration for the job Mark Hurd did at HP is in my opinion overstated. Sure, the financial/operational management appeared to work, but HP did little on Hurd’s watch to strengthen its reputation or customers’ loyalty. In particular:
  • HP’s analytics efforts have accomplished little.
  • HP’s data warehouse appliance efforts have failed pathetically.
  • From what I hear, HP’s execution in its Exadata partnership was not good.
  • HP’s server business in general is distinguished mainly by HP being a big company.
  • HP’s EDS acquisition has been rocky, not that EDS was sailing so smoothly on its own beforehand.
  • HP’s success in PCs amounts to “arguably, HP sucks a little less than the other guys”.
  • HP’s elite reputation is long gone (admittedly, for the most part that predates Hurd).
• Doug Henschen evidently favors really strong intellectual property protection for software, even forbidding plug-compatible reverse engineering. I agree with Doug up to the point that it should be forbidden to copy proprietary software, but I don’t see why he (or a court) would view such behavior as copying.

At this time, I have no idea who the lucky buyer is.

Edit: We now know it’s Teradata.

Bruce also told me that Kickfire is now up to 10 paying customers, and that there are repeat deals.

• XtremeData still hasn’t sold any dbX stuff (they’ve had a side business in generic FPGA-based boards paying the bills for years). Well, there may have been some paid POCs (proofs of concept) or something, but real sales haven’t come through yet.
• XtremeData does have three prospects who have said “Yes”, and expects one order to come through this month.
• XtremeData continues to believe it shines when:
  • Data models are complex
  • In particular, there are complex joins
  • In particular, two large tables have to be joined with each other, under circumstances where no product can avoid doing vast data redistribution
• XtremeData insists that all the nice things Bill Inmon – including in webinars — has said about it has not been for pay or other similar business compensation. That’s quite unusual.
• XtremeData is coming out with a new product, codenamed the Personal Data Warehouse (PDW), which:
  • Is ready to go into beta test
  • Should be launched in a month and a half or so
  • Will have a different name when it is launched

Naming aside,

• The XtremeData PDW consists of XtremeData software running on a Cray CX1 box.
• Thus, the XtremeData PDW will plug into a 20 amp wall power socket. It consumes 1600 watts.
• The XtremeData PDW also inherits the Cray CX1′s noise cancellation feature.
• Bottom line on the form factor: The XtremeData PDW is meant to be stuck in the corner of a business analyst’s office, not a computer room.
• The XtremeData PDW will have 16 1 TB disks (going up in size later), for 5 TB of uncompressed user data.
• Pricing isn’t finalized for the XtremeData PDW, but it will be around XtremeData’s usual figure — $20K/TB of uncompressed user data.
• XtremeData hasn’t “released” compression yet, but it’s “ready to go.”
• The XtremeData PDW will not include FPGAs, unlike other XtremeData dbX appliances. It will just run the XtremeData dbX software on 8 Nehalem chips.
• XtremeData calls this a “3-node” machine. I didn’t bother asking why it wasn’t 4-node. (Perhaps there’s a head node of some kind that properly isn’t counted.)

Some comparative notes:

• A Netezza Skimmer has similar size and price to the XtremeData PDW, seems to draw less power, has less uncompressed user data capacity (but already has compression), is also in essence a three-node system (I think), and of course has a lot of software connectivity. If XtremeData can match Netezza’s compression, the XtremeData PDW will have a 2X or so price/TB advantage over Netezza Skimmer – but Netezza’s compression is of course a moving target. I don’t know how happy Skimmer is outside a computer room.
• Kickfire manages similar amounts of data on a smaller box (5 rack units vs. 7), drawing less power (600 watts vs.1600), also with a lot of BI and ETL tool connectivity.

As we went through the contest entries in detail, it was readily apparent that today’s data warehousing solutions are either massively expensive or non-existent,” said Curt Monash, Founder of Monash Research. “Clearly, there is major dual-market opportunity for a product such as the Kickfire appliance that can not only provide an affordable data warehousing solution to small companies; but can also target larger companies that have made an initial investment in high-end solutions, yet still need to add some affordable query processing power in other areas of the organization.”

In reality:

• I spent a few minutes reviewing summaries of eight stories selected by Kickfire from the entrants, and emailed comments back to Kickfire about them. I have no further role to play in the contest.
• The part of the “quote” that slams Kickfire’s competitors is not reflective of my views.
• The “market opportunity” is in line with the positioning I’ve encouraged Kickfire to adopt. A good shorthand for it is the “Sybase IQ market.” In essence I see Kickfire as an interesting Sybase IQ alternative. But Sybase IQ is a formidable competitor, and there are many other competitors as well. This is hardly an untapped market ripe for Kickfire’s plucking.

I’m satisfied that this is all a case of lousy marketing execution – something Kickfire has a history of — rather than deliberate deception. Kickfire has recently turned over its VP of Marketing (twice) and PR resource (at least once). Scott Humphrey, Kickfire’s new outside PR guy, says he was incorrectly told by his predecessor that the press release and quote in question had been approved, and put it out without fact-checking. I believe him. I hope Kickfire CEO Bruce Armstrong will be able to add stronger marketing leadership soon. Bruce seems aware of the need, and is making reasonable marketing strategy decisions himself in the mean time, so there’s some basis for optimism.

And by the way – I don’t let vendors write press release quotes for me anyway. I let them edit in precise product names and so on, but otherwise the words are mine. The last occasion on which I recall bending this policy was inadvertent and over a year ago, when Greenplum emailed something to me — which was genuinely similar to my opinion — while I was on the phone with Aster at a particularly frenzied time, and I didn’t immediately realize the words weren’t my own.

• Teradata ascribes considerable importance to a Virtual Storage technology whose main purpose is to allow mixing of heterogeneous storage devices in a single system. And the discussion rarely suggests that these parts will be in a rigid fixed relationship.
• Netezza — as Teradata keeps reminding me — often sells boxes with the expectation that they won’t be filled with data, so as to increase spindle count and hence performance.
• Oracle/Sun have dropped some comments about Exadata being more flexibly configured going forward.
• Kickfire’s new “high-end” appliance lets you attach fairly arbitrary amounts of external storage.
• And of course, software-only analytic DBMS vendors run their software in all sorts of hardware and storage environments.

What’s more, the claim never made a lot of sense anyway. With the rarest of exceptions, even a single data warehouse’s workload will contain different queries that strain different parts of the system in different ratios. Calculating the “ideal” hardware configuration for that single workload would be forbiddingly difficult. And even if one could calculate it, it almost surely would be different than another user’s “ideal” configuration. How a single hardware configuration can be “ideally balanced” for a broad class of use cases boggles the imagination.

]]> http://www.dbms2.com/2009/10/25/data-warehouse-balanced-hardware-configuration/feed/ 6 http://www.dbms2.com/2009/10/18/kickfire-capacity-and-pricing/ http://www.dbms2.com/2009/10/18/kickfire-capacity-and-pricing/#comments Sun, 18 Oct 2009 09:16:14 +0000 Curt Monash http://www.dbms2.com/?p=1109 Kickfire’s marketing communication efforts are still a work in progress. Kickfire did finally relax its secrecy about FPGA-vs.-custom-silicon – not coincidentally during Netezza’s recent publicity cycle. That wise choice helped Kickfire get some favorable attention recently for its technical and market strategy, e.g. from Daniel Abadi, Merv Adrian and, kicking things off — as it were — me. Weeks after a recent Kickfire product release, there’s finally a fairly accurate data sheet up, although there’s still one self-defeatingly misleading line I’ll comment on below. Pricing is a whole other area of confusion, although it seems that current list prices have been inadvertently* leaked in Merv’s post linked above, with only one inaccuracy that I can detect.**

*I gather from the company that they forgot to tell Merv pricing was NDA.

** Merv cited a price as “starting” that I believe to be top-of-the-line. No criticism of Merv is implied in that; Kickfire has not been very clear in communicating hard numbers.

All that said, if one takes Kickfire’s marketing statements literally, Kickfire list pricing is around $20-50K per terabyte for a few small, fixed, high-performance configurations. That’s all-in, for plug-and-play appliances. What’s more, that range is based on the actual published user data capacity numbers for various Kickfire models, which I think are low for several reasons:

• Kickfire doesn’t officially admit that its model with 14.4 terabytes of disk can manage more than 6 terabytes of data, even though it clearly can.
• Actually, those 14.4 terabytes of disk can be increased or lowered as you choose.
• The basic compression figures implied in those calculations seem conservative.
• Compression figures are a lot more conservative yet, in that Kickfire assumes you’ll have a lot of actual indexes on your data. I’m not sure that’s necessary for most workloads.

• Infobright now has >100 paying customers.
• Typical database size is from the low 100s of gigabytes to the low single-digit number of terabytes.
• Agile development is at or approaching two-week release cycles.
• Like Kickfire, Infobright  has a multi-year deal with MySQL that insulates it against many potential Oracle/MySQL shenanigans.
• From an industry perspective, Infobright’s customer base sounds a lot like other vendors’:
  • Data mart outsourcing/online analytics
  • Log files for websites
  • Telecommunications
  • Financial services
  • OEM, especially in the markets cited above
  • “Hey, we’re beginning to see the occasional energy deal”
  • A few random others
• Infobright is seeing some household-name customers, who surely have big-name analytic DBMS products, but who also have a policy that open source is the default choice, and if open source can get the job done then the favorite closed-source choices aren’t used.
• Infobright has the usual open-source community story — lots of involvement and engagement in the forums, but contributions are limited mainly to connectivity, utility scripts, etc. (Maybe some national language translation too; I’m not sure.)