Funny timing! One of my friends who used to work for 3PAR left 3PAR not long after HP completed the acquisition and he went to Vertica, which is a scale out column-based distributed high performance database. Certainly not an area I am well versed in but I got a bit of info a couple weeks ago and the performance numbers are just outstanding, the kind of performance gains that you really probably have to see to believe, fortunately for users their software is free to download, and it sounds like it is easy to get up and running (I have no personal experience with it, but would like to see it in action at some point soon). Performance gains up up to 10,000% are not uncommon vs traditional databases.
It really sounds like an awesome product that can do more real time analysis on large amounts of data (from a few gigs to over a Petabyte). Something that Hadoop users out there should take notice of. If you recall last year I wrote a bit about organizations I have talked to that were trying to do real time with hadoop with (most likely) disastrous results, it’s not built for that, never was, which is why Google abandoned it (well not hadoop since they never used the thing but Mapreduce technology in general at least as far as their search index is concerned they may use it for other things). Vertica is unique in that it is the only product of it’s kind in the world that has a software connector that can connect hadoop to Vertica. Quite a market opportunity. Of course a lot of the PHB-types are attracted to Hadoop because it is a buzzword and because it’s free. They’ll find out the hard way that it’s not the holy grail they thought it was going to be and go to something like Vertica kicking and screaming.
So back to my friend, he’s back at HP again, he just couldn’t quite escape the gravitational pull that was HP.
Also somewhat funny as it wasn’t very long ago that HP announced a partnership with Microsoft to do data warehousing applications. Sort of reminds me when NetApp tried to go after Data Domain, mere days before they announced their bid they put out a press release saying how good their dedupe was..
Oh and here’s the news article from our friends at The Register.
The database runs in parallel across multiple machines, but has a shared-nothing architecture, so the query is routed to the data and runs locally. And the data for each column is stored in main memory, so a query can run anywhere from 50 to 1,000 times faster than a traditional data warehouse and its disk-based I/O – according to Vertica.
The Vertica Analytics Database went from project to commercial status very quickly – in under a year – and has been available for more than five years. In addition to real-time query functions, the Vertica product continuously loads data from production databases, so any queries done on the data sets is up to date. The data chunks are also replicated around the x64-based cluster for high availability and load balancing for queries. Data compression is heavily used to speed up data transfers and reduce the footprint of a relational database, something on the order of a 5X to 10X compression.
Vertica’s front page now has a picture of a c Class blade enclosure, jus think of what you can analyze with a enclosure filled with 384 x 2.3Ghz Opteron 6100s (which were released today as well and HP announced support for them on my favorite BL685c G7), and 4TB of memory all squeezed into 10U of space.
If your in the market for a data warehouse / BI platform of sorts, I urge you to at least see what Vertica has to offer, it really does seem revolutionary, and they make it easy enough to use that you don’t need an army of PhDs to design and build it yourself (i.e. google).
Speakin’ of HP, I did look at what the new Palm stuff will be and I’m pretty excited I just wish it was going to get here sooner. I went out and bought a new phone in the interim until I can get my hands on the Pre 3 and the Touchpad. My Pre 1 was not even on it’s last legs it was in a wheelchair and a oxygen bottle. New phone isn’t anything fancy just a feature phone, it does have one thing I’m not used to having though, battery life. The damn thing can go easily 3 days and the battery doesn’t even go down by 1 bar. And I have heard from folks that it will be available on Sprint, which makes me happy as a Sprint customer. Still didn’t take a chance and extend my contract just in case that changes.