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October 29, 2007

ParAccel Launches, sets new benchmarks and .......

ParAccel officially launched today and introduced their high speed columnar database for analytic processing. I have covered ParAccel back in August and we a chance to interview the CEO David Ehrlich on a podcast so please take a look..

Two additional pieces from the announcement caught my eye ParAccel already has a reference customer LatiNode, Inc. a US-based provider of advanced telecommunications services and along with newly announced hardware partner Sun they set a new 100 Gigabyte, 300 Gigabyte, and One Terabyte TPC-H Benchmark Records for Performance and Price/Performance.

Its not a common occurrence that a newly announced company comes to market complete with top class partners, reference customers and new performance benchmarks. Here are links to the specifics.

The ParAccel Analytic Database on Sun Servers Shatters Benchmark Records
ParAccel Launches Company and Introduces High Speed Columnar Database for Analytic Processing

Tags: Business Intelligence, ParAccel, DBMS, Appliance, Accelerator, Sun Microsystems, David Ehrlich

Posted by Shawn Rogers at 9:37 AM | | Comments (0)

February 6, 2007

Greenplum is making news again today

I get about 30 press releases a day and sometimes you have to laugh at what some companies find news worthy. The one I just received from Greenplum made me sit up and take notice.

  • Announced today that Smart Communications Inc. (SMART), the Philippines' leading wireless service provider, has selected the data warehouse appliance solution offered by the two companies.
  • A $15 million venture capital financing round was led by Sierra Ventures, previous Greenplum investors Mission Ventures, Dawntreader Ventures, and EDF Ventures also participated in the round. In addition, Greenplum announced that Comerica Bank has extended a $4 million line of credit to the company.
  • Named former Sun Microsystems, Inc. senior executive Bill Cook as Chief Executive Officer. During his tenure at Sun, Bill held many leadership positions, most recently serving as Senior Vice President of US sales. In this position, he led a field force of 3,500 with revenues in excess of $5 billion.
  • Established a regional headquarters in Singapore and hired industry veteran Vinay Samuel as its General Manager for Asia Pacific Region. Prior to Greenplum, Samuel was General Manager of Asia Pacific for Netezza, a US-based data warehousing appliance vendor.

Congratulations, thats a news worthy day!

Technorati Tags: Data warehouse appliance, Sun Microsystems, Greenplum, business intelligence

Posted by at 11:25 AM | | Comments (0)

July 26, 2006

New Data Warehouse Appliance Solution from Sun and Greenplum

What would happen in the data warehouse appliance space if a new player entered the market and offered a solution for as low as $15,000 per terabyte? Looks like we are going to find out!

Sun Microsystems and Greenplum have launched an appliance that uses the high data throughput and storage density of the Sun Fire X4500 server with Opteron processors and Greenplum's Scale-Everything™ parallel database. The system is powered by Solaris(tm) 10 operating system and PostgreSQL.

I've watched the data warehouse appliance space with a lot of interest over the past couple years. Todays news will certainly impact Netezza and Datallegro the present leaders in the space but I can't help wonder what the folks at Teradata are thinking about another company getting into this space. Also, it seems that Sun and Greenplum have beaten the team at HP to the market as well. There have been a ton of rumors circulating as to weather Mark Hurd and team might enter the appliance market in a bid to take market share from his old company and others.

Sun could really make an interesting play in the space with this solution, they are addressing several areas all at once.

  • Positioning as a low cost leader
  • Bring non-commodity hardware into the picture
  • leveraging open source to a high level
  • highly efficient hardware designed to save energy (90 watt per Terabyte)
  • A huge national sales force

I think the last interesting part of this news is the focus of Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, I have been told that this project was brokered by Jonathan and Greenplum CEO Scott Yara directly. It seems to me that with this level of endorsement the focus on this project will be highly coordinated at both Sun and Greenplum. The impact of a company the size of Sun on this market won't go unnoticed. Sun hopes to announce its first customer in the coming weeks, a 100 terabyte installation is in the works.

I am interested in hearing your take on the topic, please post comments on this one.

Other links:
Jonathan Swartz's Blog - comments on Greenplum July 10th 2006
Past post from me on Greenplum

Technorati Tags: Sun Microsystems, Greenplum, b-eye-network.com, data warehouse appliance, business intelligence, data warehouse

Posted by at 6:02 AM | | Comments (7)

April 26, 2006

What's next for Sun Microsystems

The news that Scott McNealy has stepped down after 22 years at the helm of Sun caused mixed feelings here on my end. Personally I liked watching Scott speak, his barbed comments at Microsoft and others in the industry have made many people in the industry laugh. I think that he is very much a visionary but its clear that things have to change at Sun. I live in the Boulder area near the Sun campus and I can't count how many of my friends have been laid off over the past few years. And most who have stayed on are constantly in the shadow of down sizing. I'm not too sure that Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s president will do anything to shake things up but I hope that addressing the culture at Sun is as high on his list as the P&L.

The announcement of McNealy's departure took place as the company announced a $217 million dollar loss. McNealy will remain a full time employee of the company and retain his Chairman title. The stock jumped 9% on the announced changes.

I hope that things change quickly for Sun and all of my friends that work there.

Posted by at 9:52 AM | | Comments (0)

January 11, 2006

I love you man...No man I love YOU

Its always nice to see people getting along. And I for one am glad to see that Larry (Ellison) and Scott (McNealy) are still buddies. I guess mutual hate and loathing of Microsoft and IBM can be the basis for a business partnership. I'm not too sure which company will get the most out of the deal, Oracle has agreed to keep JAVA for another 10 years and Sun is bundling Oracle on all of its mid and large scale boxes provided that the end user buys a years worth of support from Oracle.

Here's a fun quote from the recent announcement:

Scott McNealy: “We’ve got to get this out of the way: Are you buying Sun?” Ellison retorted that McNealy would have to read about it in the newspapers first, because “Oracle likes to do everything hostilely.”

Interesting things are sure to come from these two companies.

Read more

Posted by at 2:53 PM | | Comments (0)

October 6, 2005

How do you save 75% on office productivity software?

Sun Microsystems thinks the best way is to use StarOffice 8 Office Suite. It runs on Linux, Solaris and Windows, is industry standards compliant and costs around $75 bucks. I'll let you do your own research but the suite does have applications that are as good or close to that offered by Microsoft Office. The other cool addition to this version is the inclusion of the .ODT format document. It's XML based, OpenDocument 1.0 compliant, takes up almost 40% less disk space than a .DOC file and overall makes documents from StarOffice easier to share and use.

Check out the support site StarOffice Portal for details

Posted by at 3:12 PM | | Comments (1)

September 20, 2005

Let's have an iPod moment!!

Thats what Chairman/CEO Scott McNealy has said to his team recently and apparently reapeatedly. The phrase pays homage to the innovation and success that Apple has found with it's iPod products and McNealy feels his team at sun has a had a few moments these past weeks as well.

oracle-sm1.jpg


During his keynote this afternoon he outlined six significant programs that are Sun's recent iPod moments: