Five Minutes of News: Vertica’s Analytic Database Gets Virtualized, VMware Style

February 25, 2009

Listen to the Podcast:

Editor’s note: This is one of an ongoing series of podcasts focused on significant news in the business intelligence and related sectors. The above podcast with David Menninger, Vertica’s Vice President of Marketing and Product Management, looks at the release of a virtualized version of its Analytic Database that operates on a VMware platform. Here is the press release from that announcement:

BILLERICA, Mass., Feb. 23, 2009 — Will virtualization of data centers spell the end of specialized hardware-based data warehouse appliances? If Vertica has anything to say about it, the answer is “yes.”

Vertica today unveiled a new version of its Vertica Analytic Database packaged as a virtualized appliance to run in VMware environments. The new Vertica Virtualized Analytic Database is a simple-to-deploy, self-contained software package that runs its own operating system and copy of Vertica, on any VMware-supported hardware as if it were a physical computer.

The Vertica Virtualized Analytic Database is the first high-performance analytic database to run as a virtual machine in private enterprise compute clouds. It offers the high performance and simplicity of a plug-and-play hardware appliance, but running on commodity hardware already present in the data center, rather than on costly specialized hardware. At last, this allows data warehousing teams to gain the benefits that virtualization, consolidation and cloud computing bring, including easier management, high availability, data center energy savings and faster deployment of solutions to the business.

“Virtualization is the biggest manageability trend to hit IT in years, so it’s important to see an analytic database vendor like Vertica participating,” said Philip Howard, research director with Bloor Research. “Virtualization of analytic databases will improve data center agility and economics by making it possible to install and ready a database for loading within hours—on any spare hardware in the data center, instead of waiting the weeks it usually takes to procure and setup a new data warehouse database system. Of course, you’re not likely to have a spare 20 terabyte hanging around but this initiative will be important for smaller projects and when upgrading existing Vertica implementations. Ultimately it should save IT money and allows businesses to benefit from analysis more quickly.”

The new edition of Vertica combines a full-featured version of the Vertica Analytic Database with VMware’s hypervisor virtualization platform and an optimized self-contained Linux operating system. Vertica is the world’s fastest analytic database; it delivers query results 50 to 200 times faster than other solutions, including specialized data warehouse hardware. Its unique columnar, MPP architecture and pioneering data compression also make it substantially less costly to deploy than traditional data warehouse databases.

“We’re excited to see Vertica bringing data warehouses into the virtualization era,” said Charles Wardell, CTO of MarketBridge, a marketing and sales professional services firm to the Fortune 500 and leading global companies. “When dealing with a very large volume of data, most disk I/O intensive applications are not suitable for virtualization. Because of Vertica’s columnar database and innovative compression techniques, Vertica minimizes disk I/O making virtualization a pretty flexible option. This enables our data centers to contain large volumes of our customers’ response data and scale our data warehouse on demand simply by increasing the number of Vertica instances running on VMware. More importantly, it improves data center profitability by reducing capital costs, administrative burden and hardware footprint.”

The Vertica Virtualized Analytic Database is ideal for organizations that frequently deploy new data marts or whose analytic databases grow rapidly or have data workloads that are constantly in flux due to seasonal usage. Deploying them in virtualized “private cloud” environments makes them easier to expand and faster to deploy without having to wait or waste money procuring new hardware and software. It’s also a great solution for doing quick, short-term analytic projects.

Posted by Carl · Filed Under Interviews