Welcome!

Cloud Expo Authors: Sue Poremba, Pat Romanski, Elizabeth White, Patrick Burke, Jeremy Geelan

Related Topics: Java, .NET, Perl, Python

Java: Article

Big Data Kills 30-Year-Old Market

Applications need to go to “Big Data,” not the other way around

Data Services Journal

If you’ve got simply scads of data – and why wouldn’t you? – it’s doubling every 18 months – and are shuttling it to an application for analysis, you’re doing it wrong.

That’s so…so, well, 1980.

According to Aster Data, applications need to go to “Big Data,” not the other way around.

And to do that the company’s got a massively parallel data-application server that can embed applications inside a massively scalable MPP data warehouse and analyze petabytes of data – or terabytes, if that’s all you’ve got – ultra-fast.

Apps are automatically parallelized for scale; users can take their existing Java, C, C++, C#, .NET, Perl and Python applications, MapReduce-enable them and push them down into the data.

The widgetry runs on a cluster of commodity boxes. Figure five servers to start although parallelized applications can utilize terabytes of memory and thousands of CPU cores.

This is not the data warehouses, DBMSes and data analytics solutions of the last three decades that have separated data from applications, a technique Aster says results in massive data movement, latency and restricted analysis.

Traditional systems weren’t built to process billions of rows of data in seconds or handle chi-chi stuff like real-time fraud detection, customer behavior modeling, merchandising optimization, affinity marketing, trending and simulations, trading surveillance and customer calling patterns.

They were built for data sampling, an inexact science. They simply fail in today’s big data, analytics-intensive environments, Aster says.

The company’s Aster Data 4.0 brings data and applications together in one system, fully parallelizing both, to deliver ultra-fast analysis on massive data scales. And it’s got customers like comScore, Full Tilt Poker, Telefonica I+D, SAS and MySpace, with the big clutch of data of all, saying it’s right.

Aster’s Massively Parallel Data-Application Server 4.0, based on research done at Stanford University before commercialization started a couple of years ago, lets companies embed application logic in Aster’s MPP database, which includes MapReduce. It was Aster that brought MapReduce to SQL, a trick it’s now building on.

In Aster’s system data management lives independent of the application processing but – and this is important – the data and applications execute as first-class citizens, with their own respective data and application management services.

The Data-Application Server is responsible for managing and coordinating the cluster’s activities and resource sharing. It acts as a host for the application processing and the data managed inside the cluster.

As a data host, it manages incremental scaling, fault tolerance and heterogeneous hardware for application processing and it manages workloads via Aster’s new Dynamic Workload Management (WLM) capability.

Aster says WLM, described as the first dynamic workload management capability available on a MPP system to run on commodity hardware, can support hundreds of concurrent mixed workloads. It manages data storage, transactional correctness, online backups and information lifecycles (ILM).

The separation of data management and application processing is supposed to provide maximum application portability so a wide range of applications can be pushed down into the system.

Aster says this data analysis architecture distinguishes its solution from lightweight implementations of MapReduce, including what some vendors refer to as ‘In-Database MapReduce.

Richard Zwicky, president of Enquisite, the company that provides search optimization software and solutions, says that with Aster Data, response times for large queries has dropped from five minutes to five-10 seconds, and queries that previously weren’t possible now can be executed in 20-30 seconds.

Aster Data is backed by Sequoia Capital, Jafco Ventures, IVP and Cambrian Ventures, as well as Google’s first investor David Cheriton, Ron Conway and Rajeev Motwani.

More Stories By Maureen O'Gara

Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025. Twitter: @MaureenOGara

Comments (1) View Comments

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.


Most Recent Comments
MarlenaFernandezBerkowitz 11/09/09 12:49:00 PM EST

Interesting post from Enquisite CEO Mark Hoffman (former
CEO and founder of Sybase) on how they're using Aster
Data to meet their pretty demanding scalability, always-
on needs...

Cloud Expo Breaking News
Nearly every enterprise is evaluating cloud computing solutions either today or in the near term. Many have already made the leap, and many more are getting close to putting that first toe in the water. But there are key considerations that should be made, questions to be asked, and designs to consider before you can feel secure with your provider. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, David Gulick, Product Manager, Hosting Product Management at Savvis, will help give you food f...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four weeks away, what better time to introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else have they written and/or said about the Cloud that is t...
SYS-CON Events announced today that Super Micro Computer, Inc., a global leader in high-performance, high-efficiency server technology and green computing, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. Supermicro (NASDAQ: SMCI), the leading innovator in high-performance, high-efficiency server technology, is a premier provider of advanced server Building Block Solutions for Embedded Systems, E...
SYS-CON Events announced today that ScaleMP, a leading provider of virtualization solutions for high-end computing, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. ScaleMP is the leader in virtualization for high-end computing, providing maximum performance and lower total cost of ownership (TCO). The innovative Versatile SMP (vSMP) architecture aggregates multiple independent systems into a sin...
Come learn real-world examples where cloud and mobile are changing the way business works and the impact they're having on efficiency and productivity. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Rodrigo Coutinho Senior Product Marketing Manager at OutSystems, will look at how mobile and the cloud are interwoven and the wave of change these two 2012 megatrends will bring to your organization. He will also provide a roadmap to assure you can navigate this sea change for business succes...
Enterprise IT organizations want to deploy a virtualized data center fabric that will provide the foundation for agile private cloud computing. Getting there does not have to be difficult, but it does require a new approach to data center infrastructure design – an approach that is non-disruptive, vendor-agnostic, and very adaptable to changing business requirements. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Bruce Fingles, Chief Information Officer and VP of Product Quality at Xsigo...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four weeks away, what better time to introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
How can businesses harness the power of APIs to reach new customers and markets? In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Alistair Farquharson, CTO at SOA Software, will walk the audience through the growth and evolution of the API, why effective API management is important, and how the game changes when companies expose business applications to the outside world. He will also discuss: A brief history of the API How to use APIs to make money, save money, build brand "Appificatio...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four weeks away, what better time to introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four weeks away, what better time to introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else have ...