greenplum

EMC: The platform company

It's Monday morning at EMC World 2011 and EMC Chairman Joe Tucci opens the show with 10,000-plus in the audience. On stage with Tucci are big black boxes. What's wrong with this picture? EMC is no longer a company that can be primarily characterized as a maker of big black boxes. Tucci has engineered a transformation of EMC from an enterprise IT storage box vendor to a provider of computing platforms. Let me count them:

Nos. 1, 2, and 3: Foremost among EMC's platforms is VMware. EMC owns approximately 85 percent of it, but unlike his … Read more

Shared storage in a 'shared nothing' environment

The computing industry is seeing dramatic growth in the use of "shared nothing" database architectures where each node functions independently of one another and is self-sufficient (Hadoop Distributed File System for example). For the sake of performance, contention among nodes for shared disk resources (SAN and NAS) is one of the things these architectures avoid by dedicating storage resources to each node, i.e. no shared disk.

While these computing architectures are best-known in the context of Web-based applications and development activities, they are no longer confined to the Web. EMC Greenplum, IBM Netezza, and ParAccel are all … Read more

Which 'big data' are you talking about?

Late last year I posted a blog item about big data and if/when it would present opportunities for storage vendors. I concluded by saying that, while it was a bit early for next-year prognostications, I expected to see the number of storage devices aimed at analytics applications blossom in 2011 with more storage vendors pursuing the opportunity.

It's now 2011 and I stand by that prediction. However, at least three definitions of big data have blossomed since that posting:

Big-data storage: systems that store really big (as in humongous) amounts of data Big-data analytics: systems that use new … Read more

From IBM Netezza to the human brain

In a surprise move, IBM is acquiring a business analytics vendor named Netezza.

I say "surprise" first because few in my line of work saw this one coming (IBM already has products in this space. Why buy another?), and second because IBM is paying $1.7 billion for a company that earned $4.2 million during its latest fiscal year on revenue of $190.6 million. That's a long way away from $1.7 billion. And, need I say this again? IBM already has a whole portfolio of Smarter Planet business analytics products and services.

However, Netezza … Read more

EMC builds new data computing division around Greenplum

EMC has announced it will acquire Greenplum, a data warehousing and business analytics software firm for an undisclosed sum. EMC will use this acquisition to form the basis of a new Data Computing Products Division led by Bill Cook, CEO of Greenplum, who will report to Pat Gelsinger, COO of EMC's Information Infrastructure Products. To put that statement into perspective, Backup and Recovery Solutions (where Data Domain and other related acquisitions now live) is also a separate EMC division reporting to Gelsinger. BRS is a big division with a lot of products. Therefore, I think one can safely bet … Read more

EMC to acquire Greenplum

EMC said Tuesday that it will acquire private data-warehousing company Greenplum in an all-cash transaction, though the terms of the deal were not released. It said that Greenplum will "form the foundation of a new data-computing product division within EMC's Information Infrastructure business."

It's no secret that digital data is on the rise, both on business and consumer levels. EMC called Greenplum a visionary leader that utilizes a built-from-the-ground architecture for analytical processing. In a statement, Pat Gelsinger, president and chief operating officer of EMC's Information Infrastructure Products, said:

The data-warehousing world is about to … Read more

Open-source funding day: Greenplum, Alfresco, Zenoss

The venture investments flowed to open-source start-ups today, with new money arriving at Greenplum, Alfresco, and Zenoss.

The biggest chunk, $27 million, went to Greenplum, which develops business intelligence software based on the open-source Bizgres software project; the company's product is designed to help customers sift through data for useful trends. New investors Meritech Capital, Sun Microsystems, and SAP Ventures made the third-round investment, which also drew some from earlier investors.

Greenplum also said it's hired Paul Salazar as vice president of corporate marketing and Joe Otto as vice president of worldwide sales.

Bizgres runs on a single … Read more

Can Sun grow?

Larry Dignan over at ZDNet asks the right question about Sun: can it grow? It just closed a good quarter, but with 1% growth, there's a lot of top-line room for improvement.

So how to get there from here?

I personally believe that Sun needs a stronger software story. I don't mean the licensing behind the software - Sun's open-source strategy is the right way to challenge the incumbents (though a little SaaS wouldn't hurt, following Dave Rosenberg's disruptive business models analysis), and Sun is primarily in the challenger role in every software market in which it competes (Java being the exception, but Java also not directly bringing in much money).… Read more