Only a couple months after acquiring Greenplum, EMC introduced the Data Computing Appliance, which is based on Greenplum Database 4.0. The Data Computing Appliance is optimized for data loading and analysis, and EMC officials claim data loading performance of 10TB per hour, according to an article posted on Enterprise Storage Forum.
The EMC Greenplum Data Computing Appliance competes with Oracle’s Exadata Database Machine, and EMC officials weren’t shy about taking pot shots.
“Exadata was designed for OLTP, where there are many queries against the same data and a lot of contention on that data. Every Exadata node sees all of the storage, and scalability doesn’t really go beyond 16 nodes,” said Ben Werther, director of product strategy for EMC’s Data Computing Products division.
In contrast, EMC’s Data Computing Appliance is based on a massively parallel processing (MPP), shared-nothing architecture where each node is seen as a separate processing element of the cluster. Each node has its own dedicated disk resources, which eliminates contention, according to Werther.
Pricing for the appliance, which combines database, compute, storage and network functions, starts at $1 million.
For more information on EMC’s Data Computing Appliance, read Kevin Komiega’s article on Enterprie Storage Forum: “EMC Takes On Oracle with Greenplum Appliance for ‘Big Data.’”
Meanwhile, the rumor mill has been abuzz with two EMC-related rumors.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Oracle is considering an acquisition of EMC (see “EMC Shares Rise On Oracle Buyout Rumor.” EMC shares rose 4.88% on Thursday as a result of the rumor, hitting $21.29 and closing in on a 52-week high of $21.83, according to the WSJ article.
EMC (NYSE: EMC) shares closed at $20.77 today, and the company will report its third quarter financial results tomorrow.
Meanwhile, the NY Post reported on Friday that EMC may be close to acquiring Isilon for about $2 billion (see “EMC in exclusive talks to buy Isilon”).
Isilon recently hired Qatalyst Partners to solicit potential acquisition offers. Qatalyst was the advisor to Data Domain when EMC acquired Data Domain, and was also the advisor to 3PAR when that company was purchased by HP.