19. February 2009 by Rick Abbott.

I’ve added two new (to me) database appliance vendors this past week, InfoBright and Aster Data.  The revised vendor matrix is attached.

I spoke with InfoBright CEO Miriam Tuerk about their product, and my initial reaction was that this was just another run of the mill column oriented database built on an open source platform.  After the discussion three key differentiators stood out:

1. InfoBright is a true open source product - their Infobright Community Edition (ICE) contains 90% of the product functionality and is provided as a free download
2. MySQL extension - turns the ubiquitous open source database into a high powered data warehouse engine 
3. “Knowledge Grid” - this component of their architecture is unique in this space and gives Infobright a huge competitive advantage in scalability, performance, and maintainability

Their business model is structured to mirror that of MySQL, with a revenue stream tied to support, training, and some consulting.  But the secret sauce is the combination of open source availability with innovations in the architecture.  The Knowledge Grid, combined with their Data Pack storage method, provide linear scalability, massive compression, and query acceleration.  Miriam provided several case studies that showed both rapid deployment (under 24 hours in one case) and extreme compression (over 30x).  Under the covers its a column store database built on Red Hat Linux.  They currently run on an Intel or AMD platform, but are planning a Windows and Solaris version this calendar year.  I’m looking forward to continuing discussions with Miriam this week, and may co-author an article with her.

I also spoke with Steve Wooledge from Aster Data this week.  He gave me an overview of their nCluster database.  Built on top of the Postgress database, this MPP platform offers extreme scalability through a clustered architecture.  MySpace uses nCluster to collect large amounts of information every hour for analytics purposes, requiring only 1/2 a resource to maintain the system - testament to their claim of “hands-off” system management.  They also run on standard Intel x86 machines, and have recently launched a “green” initiative whereby they give customers credits for each piece of existing hardware they reuse.  They have also launched a cloud version of their software, nCluster Cloud Edition, that runs on Amazon Web Services.  The only concern I have is Steve didn’t have a good answer to the question around long-term management of hot-spots in the MPP environment, although the MySpace example seems to show they have a solution in place.

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8. February 2009 by Rick Abbott.

I’m getting a lot of interest recently in the data warehouse appliance chart I’ve been maintaining.  I just spoke with Joe Foley, CTO of illuminate and added them to the spreadsheet.  Their flagship product, iLuminate, stores data in a “value based storage” methodology that is neither row nor column.  Essentially each unique data element in the database is stored, with all relationships (forward and reverse) captured in a pointer fashion.  According to Joe this enables the database to realize significant compression of greater than 50%, while being able to scale in a linear manner without bound (except for 64-bit addressing limit in the hardware).  The only run on a Windows platform, but are planning on rolling out a Linux based system in 2009.  illuminate also has an analytical package called iCorrelate, which provides ad hoc reporting and analysis capability.

I have calls scheduled this week with Infobright’s CEO Miriam Tuerk and Aster Data.  Will post a new sheet at the end of the week.

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23. January 2009 by Rick Abbott.

I had a briefing from Kim Stanick, VP Marketing for ParAccel yesterday, and made a few updates to the DW appliance vendor chart I’m maintaining.  The chart lists vendor solutions grouped by full stack, database-only, and hardware, and lists key features for each vendor such as architecture (MPP vs SMP, row vs column orientation), DBMS and OS platforms, and key integration partners.

If you would like to add your solution to the list or update an existing entry please send me an e-mail at rick@360degreeview.com

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31. July 2008 by Rick Abbott.

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.

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10. July 2008 by Rick Abbott.

I spoke with Linda Arens, VP Alliances and Marketing for SAND. Here’s a summary of the discussion:

• SAND is based in Montreal, is listed on the OTC (SNDTF.OB). They have about 50-60 employees in the company.
• They stared in 1983 as a hardware company, but have remade themselves with proprietary storage software purchased from Lockheed Martin
• They have a number of products listed on their web site, but according to Linda they are all based on the same underlying foundation, hence the “DNA” moniker
• At the core is a column based, high compression database management system (DNA Analytics). Linda said they advertise 90% compression rates, but see mid-90s and above in real world scenarios. The database runs on a variety of operating systems (HP, Sun, Linux, Windows), and hardware platforms. This is not a full-stack appliance, but a special purpose database management system.
• SAND has pre-built integration with SAP BI, Oracle, IBM DB2, and Microsoft, and can operate behind or in conjunction with any of them.
• DNA Access component is intended to offload infrequently used data from the primary server, while still allowing seamless on-line access to the data. The big advantage of this is zero impact to existing user applications. This sounded similar to the way Dataupia operates, working behind the scenes to accelerate queries. DNA Access does allow direct queries, either using SQL or via a ODBC compliant access tool (she mentioned Business Objects, Microstrategy, and Cognos).
• SAND does have a small professional services group that focuses primarily on the setup and installation of their product. She said they leave the systems integration work to partners such as Accenture.

In their most recent financial results announcement, they touted a deal with P&G for the SAP BI product. Given the volumes in some SAP systems this capability would seem to be a competitive advantage. But I don’t know if SAND has anything else that differentiates them from the host of companies that are in this space now. Looking at their financial report, they listed $1.9M in revenue for the past quarter, which says they are still in their infancy in terms of actual sales. Given the amount of venture capital flowing into this sector, they will have a tough time getting traction.

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10. July 2008 by Rick Abbott.

I’ve added some information recently to the appliance spreadsheet, and figured it was time to repost. I made the following changes:

• Added PANTA to the “Harware” category.
• Updated information on SAND based on my discussion today with Linda Arens (VP Alliances and Marketing)
• Updated information on ParAccel based on my discussion last week with Kim Stanick (VP Marketing)

The information has also been added to the 360DegreeVendor site.

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3. July 2008 by Rick Abbott.

I’ve been hearing and reading a lot lately about “cloud computing”.  Information Week in particular has run several articles on the topic, including last weeks “Guide to Cloud Computing”.  Most of these articles have been about general purpose platforms, with the focus on Amazon, Google, and Salesforce.com offerings getting the most press.

On the surface computing in the cloud looks very similar to the hosted service offerings that sprang up in the mid-90s, led by companies such as Digex.  I believe fundamentally it is, with the exception of well known on-line brands entering the market.  And with the exception of connection speed and reliability, most of the issues are still in play, namely security, performance, and environment change control.  The benefits touted are lower TCO, faster time to market, and solution scalability.

The Data Warehouse in the Cloud (DWC) concept is just starting to take hold, led by such companies as Vertica (in partnership with Amazon).  I can see the benefits of going this route, most notably time to market.  Connection speeds might still be an issue, particularly in the case of large data load files.  And security will always be an issue, particularly with sensitive customer data.  TCO is often presented as a plus for the DWC, but it’s not that straightforward.  Factors such as initial hardware & software costs, data center operational costs, labor, and upgrade costs must all be included in the mix.

In short, the DWC is a viable alternative, particularly for a company with the following characteristics:

• Limited data center resources - hardware and/or operations staff are tapped out, and you’d need to significant capacity to deploy a new data solution
• Deploying a data solution on a “new” platform - you’re an Oracle shop but planning to deploy on Vertica
• Dispersed users - your user base is geographically spread out, and access corporate systems is through a variety of network channels
• You’re a mid-sized company and don’t have access to volume hardware and software discounts

But remember, it’s like leasing a car.  You never get rid of that payment.

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17. June 2008 by Rick Abbott.

I just released a new version of my vendor web site, 360DegreeVendor.  In addition to the vendor search capability and the analyst web crawling feature, I’ve added the option to search by offering (product, service, or research), and by venture capital firm.  You can also filter by open source offerings.

Please feel free to send me feedback if you have comments or questions after using the site.

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12. June 2008 by Rick Abbott.

I was talking to a friend of mine, Neil Moses (President of Rogomo), about potentially tying in experts from his site to 360DegreeVendor. He’s focusing his efforts on the tutoring market, but mentioned a company called Gerson Lehrman that focuses on providing high-end consulting advice on an per hour or per issue basis. They offer a broad range of services, including vertical specialties such as Telco and Health Care, as well as horizontal services such as Technology. They advertise over 5,000 service providers in the Technology space, so I did some investigating and found a fair number of providers in business intelligence (262), data warehouse (76), and data management (66) “study groups”. I sent in an inquiry about a partnership or referral program (they didn’t mention one on their web site). I’d like some information on this company if anyone has worked with them (or used their services) in the past.

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2. June 2008 by Rick Abbott.

I’m new to the widget world.  As part of my build-out of www.360degreevendor.com, I’ve been experimenting with the Clearspring widget set.  I’ve tested out both the LaunchPad options: In-Widget and On-Page methods.  The In-Widget seems to be a better fit for my site, as I have a number of areas within the home page that I’d like to share, such as the vendor search box.  Although I can see putting an On-Page button on the home page to allow people to share the entire site.

I floated a question about  Clearspring on the LinkedIn Q&A board, and received some good feedback.  The majority of the respondents recommended using WidgetBox, so I think I’ll do a trial with both and see which works out best.  I don’t think this is necessarily an either/or situation, so I might end up using both depending on their relative strengths.

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