Greenplum Data Computing Appliance: UAP Edition

Some argue that the term “Flexible Appliance” is an oxymoron, often with good reason. Among analytics users, the emergence of preconfigured analytics appliances has been a mixed blessing. While they’re simpler to deploy than build-it-yourself MPP clusters, many appliances force users to trade-off flexibility against simplicity.

Some Analytical Data Warehouse appliances (ADW) cannot be scaled on-site, which leads to enterprises over-buying and over-configuring. Others use proprietary hardware, creating a lock-in. Some are truly single-function, while others don’t have good facilities for integrating with ETL or Hadoop-based systems.

Well, “Flexible Appliance” is an oxymoron no more.

Some months ago, Greenplum seized the opportunity to produce the industry’s first scalable, modular appliances for analytics to great success. Today we announce an enhanced Greenplum Data Computing Appliance (DCA) named the Unified Analytics Platform Edition, developed with three goals in mind:

1. Retain Greenplum’s leadership in overall price performance.
2. Support a broader array of user requirements by expanding the configuration options.
3. Improve the user experience of deployment, administration, and security, without sacrificing flexibility.

With the new release of Greenplum DCA, we’ve hit the mark:

• Increased database performance between 40% and 140% faster than previous DCAs.
• Driven load speeds beyond 16TB/hour per rack.
• Accelerated data scanning to over 40 GB per second per rack — a 185% improvement over our previous high-capacity database modules.
• Added options to integrate Hadoop with EMC Isilon Scale-Out NAS, to simplify disaster recovery facilities for HDFS.
• Created pure Hadoop appliances for applications that are based entirely on Hadoop.
• Tightened security and simplified administration by upgrading to RHEL6, and upgrading Greenplum Command Center administration tools.
• Expanded options for housing third-party applications inside the DCA with multiple Data Integration Accelerator (DIA) modules.

If you are investigating analytics appliances, and are considering Hadoop but don’t want to forfeit the expressive power of SQL, check out Greenplum’s new DCAs. For more information read the full announcement, as well as the product overview on the Greenplum DCA.