New EMC Database Appliances Come Preloaded With SAS Business Analytics Software

On Tuesday, EMC introduced three additions to its Greenplum database appliance line that are paired with SAS High-Performance Analytics software. The appliances leverage massively parallel processing architecture to quickly process and analyze the growing volume of data that businesses are accumulating.

EMC introduced the High Capacity DCA (or, Data Computing Appliance), the High Performance DCA and the Data Integration Accelerator, as well as version 4.1 of Greenplum Database software. EMC acquired Greenplum in July 2010.

The High Capacity EMC DCA is designed to host petabyte levels of data and claims to offer the lowest cost-per-unit of data warehousing appliances. High Performance EMC DCA offers data loading and data scanning performance, and features solid-state drive (SSD)-based storage.

The Data Integration Accelerator is an add-on module that handles data loading in a parallel and scalable model. Pricing information was not available. The core base-model EMC DCA, introduced by EMC in October 2010, features the ability to scale up to 864TBytes of uncompressed data.

The appliances, coupled with SAS business analytics software, address two major trends in IT: the massive amount of data businesses have to deal with and the need for businesses to study that data to derive business value, says Steve Hillion, VP of analytics at EMC.Previously, companies used business analytics to study the past and answer "what" questions, such as how many units they sold, how many page views they had on their Web sites or how their costs have trended. But now the data has to do even more, Hillion says.
"Increasingly, what people want to do is more advanced analytics, where you're actually asking questions about the future. They're asking how or why questions. Why did my sales go down? What is the impact of competitive pressures?" he says.

EMC cited an analysis by the research firm IDC that reports the amount of data being generated by IT systems will grow 44-fold over the next decade. As that data volume grows, it becomes that much harder for businesses to sort through it, Hillion adds, which is where massively parallel processing (MPP) comes in.

Using current best-in-class technology, business analytics processes can take hours, or even days. With MPP, projects can be run in seconds, and businesses can create and run predictive models of the results they can achieve by changing business practices, such as lowering prices.

SAS says its High-Performance Analytics software will be available on EMC Greenplum appliances sometime in the fourth quarter of this year.

See more on this topic by subscribing to Network Computing Pro Reports State of the Database (subscription required).