EMC unveiled the first fruit this week from its recent acquisition of privately held Greenplum, which offered data-warehousing technology for self-service analytics at large corporations. EMC expects the new Greenplum data-computing appliance (DCA) unveiled Wednesday to open up multiple data sources to previously unheard-of scales in x86 computing environments.
EMC President Pat Gelsinger said he believes the new appliance based on Greenplum’s technology will become a key element of private clouds, enabling even more business agility and unlocking new sources of economic value from existing data streams.
The goal is to enable “an entirely new generation for customers to unlock hidden value in these enormous data sources that they already have,” Gelsinger said. “And to us that’s what is so thrilling about data warehousing and made the Greenplum acquisition so exciting.”
Facing the Data Challenge
DCAs are of growing interest to Fortune 500 companies awash in an ever-rising tide of data from a plethora of sources. Disney Executive Vice President Bud Albers recently said the multimedia giant probably processes more data annually than it did during the first 80 years of its existence. “The challenge becomes, what do you do with it all?” he asked.
To help large corporations achieve maximum flexibility and scalability, EMC’s new purpose-built, data-warehousing appliance is being offered in half-, full- and multiple-rack configurations. The Greenplum DCA can even linearly scale to 24 racks in a single logical complex.
A full rack contains 16 Intel servers featuring an aggregate of 192 cores, noted EMC Vice President Chuck Hollis. “Needless to say, as Intel offers more/faster cores, those can easily be put to work as well,” he wrote in a blog.
However, EMC’s data-computing appliance will face competition from rivals IBM, Oracle and Teradata. IBM said last month that it’s buying Greenplum competitor Netezza for $1.7 billion to help…