EMC Enhanced Greenplum Big Data Analytics Appliance

EMC Corporation enhanced an appliance-based unified big data analytics offering, the EMC Greenplum Data Computing Appliance (DCA), with a redesign of its analytics-optimized, scalable systems that are used for statistical analysis, predictive modeling and machine learning.

Exploding data volumes, new data types and ever-growing competitive challenges have led to changes in analytical technologies and a new approach to exploiting data.

Decades-old legacy architectures for data management and analytics are inherently unfit for scaling today’s big data volumes. The combination of burgeoning amounts of data, broad diversity in type and structure, and the need for complex mathematics to unlock value from data have overwhelmed traditional architectures and led to emergence of a new class of analytical platforms.

To address these priorities, the new DCA Unified Analytics Platform (UAP) Edition analytics appliance enables analysis of both structured and unstructured data together within a single integrated appliance. The new DCA integrates Greenplum Databases for analytics-optimized SQL, Greenplum HD for Hadoop-based processing and Greenplum partner business intelligence, ETL, and analytics applications within a single appliance. The integrated solution expands the system’s analtyics capabilities and solution flexibility at a fraction of the TCO of competitive ‘product portfolio’ strategies from Oracle, IBM or Teradata.

Price/Performance
The DCA offers the power of a massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture, while delivering fast data-loading rate and price/performance ratio without the complexity and constraints of proprietary hardware. It delivers 70+% performance gains over the prior generation for data loading and scanning, and 100% performance increases for concurrent query workloads, maintaining Greenplum’s standing as the industry’s leading analytics performance for large, mixed workloads. Enterprises can grow their DCAs as their demand for processing capacity grows or as their analytics requirement evolves.

Storage Integration for HA
The DCA provides increased system and data availability through an integration with EMC’s storage solutions. Integrating the DCA with Data Domain deduplication storage systems provides backup and recovery for Greenplum Database modules at rates up to 13TB/hour, with services for wide-area replication for enhanced DR.

The DCA provides both HDFS triple-redundant storage on direct-attach devices, as well as integration with Isilon Scale-out NAS to provide HDFS storage that also provides data protection using snapshots, mirroring, backup, recovery and replication. Isilon also simplifies data loading and permits independent scaling of compute and storage resources. Using Data Domain and Isilon, customers can leverage their existing expertise and investments to assure enterprise data protection as they move into big data analytics.

Josh Klahr , VP of products, Greenplum, a division of EMC, says: "Enterprises looking to make strategic investments in a big data platform need to consider the breadth of capabilities required of a complete solution-high speed data ingestion, support for structured and unstructured data, interfaces for data scientists as well as business intelligence users, and the ability to scale horizontally as data volumes grow. Customers can take advantage of the new DCA to increase the performance of Greenplum Database for best-in-class SQL processing and data loading, and also leverage the innovative capabilities of Greenplum’s Hadoop distribution (GPHD). With the release of the DCA Unified Analytics Platform Edition, we are continuing our history of innovation-with improved options for Hadoop deployments leveraging EMC Isilon’s scale-out NAS storage, enhanced partner ecosystem support including such partners as SAS and Informatica."

The Greenplum DCA and all its modules and features are available.