Vertica Ushers in New Era of Data Warehouse Savings, Simplicity and Scalability Through Virtualization

Vertica Analytic Database running on VMware helps data centers consolidate "tera-mart" and data warehouse deployments in virtualized "private cloud" environments

BILLERICA, Mass., Feb. 23 -- Will virtualization of data centers spell the end of specialized hardware-based data warehouse appliances? If Vertica has anything to say about it, the answer is "yes."

Vertica today unveiled a new version of its Vertica Analytic Database packaged as a virtualized appliance to run in VMware environments. The new Vertica Virtualized Analytic Database is a simple-to-deploy, self-contained software package that runs its own operating system and copy of Vertica, on any VMware-supported hardware as if it were a physical computer.

The Vertica Virtualized Analytic Database is the first high-performance analytic database to run as a virtual machine in private enterprise compute clouds. It offers the high performance and simplicity of a plug-and-play hardware appliance, but running on commodity hardware already present in the data center, rather than on costly specialized hardware. At last, this allows data warehousing teams to gain the benefits that virtualization, consolidation and cloud computing bring, including easier management, high availability, data center energy savings and faster deployment of solutions to the business.

"Virtualization is the biggest manageability trend to hit IT in years, so it's important to see an analytic database vendor like Vertica participating," said Philip Howard, research director with Bloor Research. "Virtualization of analytic databases will improve data center agility and economics by making it possible to install and ready a database for loading within hours--on any spare hardware in the data center, instead of waiting the weeks it usually takes to procure and setup a new data warehouse database system. Of course, you're not likely to have a spare 20 terabyte hanging around but this initiative will be important for smaller projects and when upgrading existing Vertica implementations. Ultimately it should save IT money and allows businesses to benefit from analysis more quickly."

The new edition of Vertica combines a full-featured version of the Vertica Analytic Database with VMware's hypervisor virtualization platform and an optimized self-contained Linux operating system. Vertica is the world's fastest analytic database; it delivers query results 50 to 200 times faster than other solutions, including specialized data warehouse hardware. Its unique columnar, MPP architecture and pioneering data compression also make it substantially less costly to deploy than traditional data warehouse databases.

"We're excited to see Vertica bringing data warehouses into the virtualization era," said Charles Wardell, CTO of MarketBridge, a marketing and sales professional services firm to the Fortune 500 and leading global companies. "When dealing with a very large volume of data, most disk I/O intensive applications are not suitable for virtualization. Because of Vertica's columnar database and innovative compression techniques, Vertica minimizes disk I/O making virtualization a pretty flexible option. This enables our data centers to contain large volumes of our customers' response data and scale our data warehouse on demand simply by increasing the number of Vertica instances running on VMware. More importantly, it improves data center profitability by reducing capital costs, administrative burden and hardware footprint." For more on MarketBridge click here.

The Vertica Virtualized Analytic Database is ideal for organizations that frequently deploy new data marts or whose analytic databases grow rapidly or have data workloads that are constantly in flux due to seasonal usage. Deploying them in virtualized "private cloud" environments makes them easier to expand and faster to deploy without having to wait or waste money procuring new hardware and software. It's also a great solution for doing quick, short-term analytic projects.

Hardware freedom

Beyond the benefits of consolidation, the Vertica Virtualized Analytic Database also lets customers take advantage of their spare computing capacity, thanks to its ability to run on a wide variety of Windows, Linux, Solaris or any other computing platform that VMware supports. This is particularly big news for Windows-only shops and ISVs embedding Vertica in commercial analytic applications, who previously couldn't take advantage of Linux-based Vertica's blazingly fast analytic capabilities.

The Vertica Virtualized Analytic Database will be available in March 2009. For more information please visit www.vertica.com/virtual.

About Vertica

Vertica Systems is the market innovator for high-performance analytic database management systems that run on industry-standard hardware. Co-founded by database pioneer Dr. Michael Stonebraker, Vertica has developed column-oriented analytic database technology with an MPP architecture that lets companies of any size store and query very large databases orders of magnitude faster and more affordably than other solutions. The Vertica Analytic Database is available as software only, as an appliance or online as a cloud computing solution. The technology's unmatched speed, scalability, flexibility and ease of use helps customers like JP Morgan Chase, Verizon, Mozilla, Comcast, Level(3) Communications and Vonage capitalize on business opportunities in real time. Vertica is headquartered in Billerica, Mass. For more information, visit the company's Web site at http://www.vertica.com/.