Appliance Deployment Featured Article

Johannesburg’s EMC Corporation (News - Alert) hasintroduced the EMC Greenplum Data Computing Appliance, which company officials describe as “an integrated data warehouse system using the Greenplum massively parallel processing architecture.”

Company officials say it’s designed to let organizations “make sense of the massive amounts of data they generate from various sources, such as always-on networks, the Web, consumers, surveillance systems and sensors.” So you can see the obvious need for just such a tool.

It claims “twice the data loading speed of its nearest competitor and the industry's best performance,” billing itself as a product which enables more data to be analyzed faster and at lower costs.

Inana Nkanza, EMC Country Manager Southern Africa, says the new system was developed and is shipping just 75 days after EMC's acquisition of Greenplum, and comes at a time when IDC (News - Alert) predicts that the amount of data over the next decade will grow 44-fold.

“The disruptive data warehousing technology from Greenplum is a key enabler of 'big data' clouds and self-service analytics, allowing organisations to store, manage and closely analyse terabytes of detailed data for faster business insight, conclusions and revelations,” he says. “Greenplum is the foundation of EMC's new Data Computing Products Division, which is developing the analytic tools to address the 'big data' phenomenon.”

Steve Hirsch, chief data officer and senior vice-president of Global Data Services at NYSE Euronext, said as an early Greenplum customer, “we are impressed with EMC's integration and expansion of the Greenplum product line. The new appliance gives us greater flexibility in how we approach our ever-growing needs to apply sophisticated analytics to big data.”

The EMC Greenplum Data Computing Appliance is built using Greenplum Database 4.0. Its parallel-everything architecture delivers data loading performance of 10 terabytes an hour, which company officials claim is “twice as fast as Oracle Exadata systems and five times as fast as systems from Netezza and Teradata (News - Alert).”

As a purpose-built, parallel system, the appliance “offers up to three times more scalability and up to four times as many database cores than competitive systems for the industry's best price/performance ratio,” company officials say.