EMC

Discussion of storage titan EMC, especially its efforts in the data warehouse appliance market. Related subjects include:

August 19, 2012

Data warehouse appliance — analytic glossary draft entry

This is a draft entry for the DBMS2 analytic glossary. Please comment with any ideas you have for its improvement!

Note: Words and phrases in italics will be linked to other entries when the glossary is complete.

A data warehouse appliance is a combination of hardware and software that includes an analytic DBMS (DataBase Management System). However, some observers incorrectly apply the term “data warehouse appliance” to any analytic DBMS.

The paradigmatic vendors of data warehouse appliances are:

Further, vendors of analytic DBMS commonly offer — directly or through partnerships — optional data warehouse appliance configurations; examples include:

Oracle Exadata is sometimes regarded as a data warehouse appliance as well, despite not being solely focused on analytic use cases.

Data warehouse appliances inherit marketing claims from the category of analytic DBMS, such as: Read more

February 8, 2012

Comments on the analytic DBMS industry and Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for same

This year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems is out.* I shall now comment, just as I did on the 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, and 2006 Gartner Data Warehouse Database Management System Magic Quadrants, to varying extents. To frame the discussion, let me start by saying:

*As of February, 2012 — and surely for many months thereafter — Teradata is graciously paying for a link to the report.

Specific company comments, roughly in line with Gartner’s rough single-dimensional rank ordering, include: Read more

February 6, 2012

Comments on the 2012 Forrester Wave: Enterprise Hadoop Solutions

Forrester has released its Q1 2012 Forrester Wave: Enterprise Hadoop Solutions. (Googling turns up a direct link, but in case that doesn’t prove stable, here also is a registration-required link from IBM’s Conor O’Mahony.) My comments include:

November 21, 2011

Analytic trends in 2012: Q&A

As a new year approaches, it’s the season for lists, forecasts and general look-ahead. Press interviews of that nature have already begun. And so I’m working on a trilogy of related posts, all based on an inquiry about hot analytic trends for 2012.

This post is a moderately edited form of an actual interview. Two other posts cover analytic trends to watch (planned) and analytic vendor execution challenges to watch (already up).

Read more

September 23, 2011

Some notes on Hadoop (mainly) and appliances

1. EMC Greenplum has evolved its appliance product line. As I read that, the latest announcement boils down to saying that you can neatly network together various Greenplum appliances in quarter-rack increments. If you take a quarter rack each of four different things, then Greenplum says “Hooray! Our appliance is all-in-one!” Big whoop.

2. That said, the Hadoop part of EMC ‘s story is based on MapR, which so far as I can tell is actually a pretty good Hadoop implementation. More precisely, MapR makes strong claims about performance and so on, and Apache Hadoop folks don’t reply “MapR is full of &#$!” Rather, they say “We’re going to close the gap with MapR a lot faster than the MapR folks like to think — and by the way, guys, thanks for the butt-kick.” A lot more precision about MapR may be found in this M. C. Srivas SlideShare.

3. On its latest earnings call, Oracle clearly said it would introduce a Hadoop appliance, versus just hinting at a Hadoop appliance the prior quarter. The money quote was:  Read more

June 10, 2011

Patent nonsense: Parallel Iron/HDFS edition

Alan Scott commented with concern about Parallel Iron’s patent lawsuit attacking HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System), filed in — where else? — Eastern Texas. The patent in question — US 7,415,565 — seems to in essence cover any shared-nothing block storage that exploits a “configurable switch fabric”; indeed, it’s more oriented to OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) than to analytics. For example, the Background section starts: Read more

May 14, 2011

Alternatives for Hadoop/MapReduce data storage and management

There’s been a flurry of announcements recently in the Hadoop world. Much of it has been concentrated on Hadoop data storage and management. This is understandable, since HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) is quite a young (i.e. immature) system, with much strengthening and Bottleneck Whack-A-Mole remaining in its future.

Known HDFS and Hadoop data storage and management issues include but are not limited to:

Different entities have different ideas about how such deficiencies should be addressed.  Read more

April 21, 2011

In-memory, parallel, not-in-database SAS HPA does make sense after all

I talked with SAS about its new approach to parallel modeling. The two key points are:

The whole thing is called SAS HPA (High-Performance Analytics), in an obvious reference to HPC (High-Performance Computing). It will run initially on RAM-heavy appliances from Teradata and EMC Greenplum.

A lot of what’s going on here is that SAS found it annoyingly difficult to parallelize modeling within the framework of a massively parallel DBMS such as Teradata. Notes on that aspect include:

Read more

April 16, 2011

Unpacking the EMC Greenplum Q1 sales disaster rumors

A well-connected tipster believes:

In the past I might have called Greenplum for clarification, but they’re not knocking themselves out to inform me these days, nor to inspire me with confidence in what they say.  Read more

April 5, 2011

Comments on EMC Greenplum

I am annoyed with my former friends at Greenplum, who took umbrage at a brief sentence I wrote in October, namely “eBay has thrown out Greenplum“.  Their reaction included:

The last one really hurt, because in trusting them, I put in quite a bit of effort, and discussed their promise with quite a few other people.

Read more

← Previous PageNext Page →

Feed: DBMS (database management system), DW (data warehousing), BI (business intelligence), and analytics technology Subscribe to the Monash Research feed via RSS or email:

Login

Search our blogs and white papers

Monash Research blogs

User consulting

Building a short list? Refining your strategic plan? We can help.

Vendor advisory

We tell vendors what's happening -- and, more important, what they should do about it.

Monash Research highlights

Learn about white papers, webcasts, and blog highlights, by RSS or email.