Kickfire Overview

I spoke with Karl Van Den Bergh, VP Business Development from Kickfire (founded June 2006) today and wanted to share my impressions of their company and offering, Kickfire Database Appliance. Kickfire is venture backed (Accel, Greylock, Mayfield Fund, and Pinnacle Ventures), and is based in Santa Clara, CA. They have a strategic alliance with Sun, and technology partnerships established with Jaspersoft, Talend, Pentaho, and Zmanda. Karl said they currently have approximately 60 people in the company, most of them in research and engineering.

The Kickfire Database Appliance has been in beta testing since April, and is scheduled to be launched commercially sometime in Q42008. The two key differentiators of the Kickfire platform are the Query Processing Module (QPM) and the Kickfire Storage Plug-in for MySQL

QPM is a SQL accelerator chip, akin to a graphics chip. QPM plugs into a motherboard alongside a standard Intel based quad processor, and other off-the-shelf components. By processing SQL statements on the chip, they are able to achieve significant performance gains, resulting in impressive price/performance and raw performance numbers. Kickfire’s recently released TPC-H numbers for the 100GB and 300GB classes, and set records in those categories for both performance (non-clustered category) and price/performance. They plan to run tests on larger datasets, and feel the existing numbers will scale to these larger sizes.

The storage plug-in sits under native MySQL and on top of Linux CentOS. The plug-in provides modern data warehouse features such as column store and compression. The big lift comes from deploying out of the box MySQL – access to the approximate 11 million installations of MySQL and growing. By going this route, Kickfire will not have to certify their platform with the myriad of business intelligence and data integration vendors. As long as those vendors work with MySQL, in theory they should work with Kickfire.

Kickfire has a small consulting group focused on installation and configuration of their product, but is putting partnerships in place with larger systems integrators to support full life-cycle implementations.

If you’re running, or planning on running, an analytics solution on MySQL, I think you have to give this product serious consideration. At a starting cost of about $20,000, you’ll be hard pressed to find a better price point on a system in this category. Even if you have another platform for your enterprise solution, it’s worth investigating using Kickfire to support data marts or other departmental level systems. If you’re a Microsoft shop, you’re probably best to avoid this system, unless you’re making a strategic decision to migration part or all of you infrastructure to open source. In most cases, the cost savings won’t justify the added cost and complexity of introducing one MySQL instance into your environment.

The big caveat to all of this is the production readiness of the system. Assuming they go production in Q4, they will have had less than 9 months of beta testing feedback. Any early adopters (re: anyone buying this before next Spring) should bake in plenty of internal testing to their deployment schedule, or better yet set this up in a sand-box environment until the 1.0 bugs have shaken out.

This entry was posted on 31. July 2008 at 17:41 and is filed under Technical Focus, Vendors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.