EMC Goes Up Against IBM, Oracle With Data Warehousing Appliance

EMC on Wednesday opened a new competitive front against Oracle and IBM in the data warehousing market with the introduction of an appliance based on technology from its Greenplum acquisition only 75 days after that acquisition closed.

EMC's new Greenplum Data Computing Appliance is targeting the same data warehousing and data analytics market as Oracle's Exadata systems and systems from Netezza and Teradata.

EMC in July unveiled plans to acquire data warehouse technology provider Greenplum and use its technology to form a new data computing product division in an all-cash transaction for an undisclosed sum.

Greenplum is the developer of what it calls "Enterprise Data Cloud" solutions for large-scale data warehousing and analytics. Those solutions, based on a massively parallel processing system, support the data warehousing and large scale analytic processing requirements of companies managing terabytes or petabytes of data.

Greenplum counted among its customers such companies NASDAQ OMX, NYSE Euronext, Reliance Communications, Skype, and Fox Interactive Media/MySpace.

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The Greenplum Data Computing Appliance combines EMC's new Greenplum technology with server hardware from Dell, a long-time EMC partner.

The release of the Greenplum Data Computing Appliance comes at a time of big data growth. EMC, quoting reports from analyst firm IDC, said the amount of data stored is expected to grow 44-fold over the next data.

That growth, and the need to better store, manage, and analyze such data for business insight, has caused several vendors to look at combining data warehousing software and hardware into appliances.

Oracle has already combined its own data warehousing software with server technology it got with the January acquisition of Sun Microsystems in its Exadata appliances. The company released a new version of Exadata at last month's Oracle OpenWorld conference.

IBM, meanwhile, last month said it plans to acquire Netezza in a $1.7 billion deal. Prior to that announcement, Netezza, which develops data warehousing software, worked together with IBM to develop a data warehousing appliance.

Next: Speeds And Feeds Of EMC's New Appliance

The EMC Greenplum Data Computing Appliance loads data at up to 10 TBs per hour, which EMC claimed is twice as fast as the Oracle Exadata and five times as fast as Netezza and Teradata systems. The company also claimed the appliance had up to three times the scalability of competing systems.

Data on the appliance, which is available in half-rack and full-rack configurations, is protected with EMC's replication, backup and recovery, and Data Domain deduplication technologies.

When fully configured with two master servers and 16 segment servers, the appliance boasts a total usable memory capacity of 768 GBs and a total storage capacity of 144 TBs.

EMC spokesperson said in an e-mail the new appliances are currently available only for direct sales. EMC executives were unavailable for further comments. However, an