Aster Data Compression

Aster Data Systels, Inc., provider of data analytics and management platform for ‘Big Data’ applications, announced that Aster nCluster and nCluster Cloud Editions offer an intelligent software approach to compression which enables information lifecycle management (ILM).

Aster nCluster Smart Compression reduces costs while increasing flexibility by allowing enterprises to store vast quantities of data for the lowest possible cost on commodity hardware, without sacrificing query performance. Aster nCluster Smart Compression, included as a key feature in all editions of the nCluster database, is available today.

With Aster nCluster Smart Compression, database administrators can set compression policies at a much more granular level than traditional database vendors. Combined with logical partitioning, which breaks down a parent table into smaller child tables (e.g. monthly, weekly, daily child tables), nCluster Smart Compression allows compression at any level in the hierarchy. Additionally, different levels of compression (high, medium, low) can easily be defined and altered over time. This gives administrators the flexibility to choose the right level of compression at the right object level, depending on their performance and space saving requirements.

"Aster Smart Compression gives us fine-grained control as part of our ILM to optimize cost savings, and helps us adapt to the changing value of data over time. We are able to lower operational costs and improve the performance of queries with minimal impact on access, depending on which compression level we use," said Amanda Powter, Senior Product Manager, Specific Media, Inc. "We use ‘high’ compression to achieve 7x reductions in space for longer-term data storage. For data accessed more frequently, we use ‘medium’ or ‘low’ compression and have seen improvements in our common queries without losing access to the full dataset. One major advantage is the highly intuitive administration of Aster Smart Compression via a standard SQL interface as well as visibility via a GUI."

Aster Smart Compression also allows for data to be compressed at a physical partition level as well as at a logical table level. This object-level compression capability allows administrators to achieve fine-grained management. Certain child tables may need to be accessed more quickly and therefore should be compressed low – for example, today’s orders are recent data that are likely to be queried frequently. Other older child tables may be accessed very infrequently and therefore can be compressed HIGH.

"For IT managers trying to meet new regulatory requirements for data retention and protection or that desire a cost-effective solution for long-term historical analysis (e.g. customer lifetime value) the many DBMS systems in the market that rely on hardware-based solutions for ILM are too expensive and complex," said Tasso Argyros, CTO of Aster Data. "New government regulations and guidelines requiring organizations to retain and control information for very long periods of time demand a better solution. Aster provides a smarter software approach to ILM and compression that reduces storage costs and disk space requirements for all types of data while improving application performance and allowing you to run on your choice of commodity hardware."