ParAccel With Fusion-io to Integrate SSD on Datawarehouse Appliance

ParAccel, Inc., provider of the ParAccel Analytic Database, announced the ParAccel Analytic Appliance (PAA), a packaged software appliance created for simple installation and configuration on commodity hardware by customers, partners or ParAccel. Simultaneously, the company announced it has teamed with Fusion-io to deliver an ultra-performance option for PAA. The strategic partnership between ParAccel and Fusion-io propels data warehousing to breakthrough levels of performance and efficiency. Together, ParAccel and Fusion-io pair enterprise-class solid-state technology with the world’s fastest analytic database to create the first flash-powered columnar analytic appliance to reach the marketplace.

When deployed with Fusion’s ioMemory, the ParAccel Analytic Appliance represents a blending of hardware and software designed to deliver processing speeds. By integrating a new solid-state flash memory tier, data can be read 15 times faster than with traditional enterprise storage. ParAccel integrates ioMemory close to the CPUs to realize the ultimate in I/O speeds. The ParAccel Analytic Database platform further enhances the PAA’s performance with its high compression levels and cutting edge Omne query optimizer, which enables complex data exploration without the bloat of indices, materialized views or specialized schemas required by other platforms.

ParAccel and Fusion-io together provide companies with transformational analytic processing and new levels of data-driven intelligence. The pairing also represents dramatic savings in hardware cooling and storage costs with an appliance that generates higher output from fewer physical servers, therefore shrinking the overall hardware and energy footprint. It’s never been easier or less expensive for organizations to leverage ultra-performance data analytics wherever the technology can improve informed process automation or ad hoc strategic decision making.

"Inserting a new tier of flash-based memory into the compute nodes of a powerful analytic software appliance like ParAccel’s produces precisely the kind of dramatic end-user gain we envisioned when we founded Fusion-io," said Tyler Smith, VP Strategic Alliances, Fusion-io. "ParAccel shares our vision of creating technologies that revolutionize access to information through ultra high-performance computing, and we’re pleased our technology plays a key role in furthering the business value and utility of analytics."

Analysts predict the introduction of flash-based solid-state technology into data warehouse appliances will bring organizations dramatic gains in performance that will ultimately affect how they use data to make decisions. "Solid-state represents a major leap forward in hardware technology that’s on par with the introduction of massively parallel, columnar architectures on the database software side," said Dan Vesset, Program Vice President of Business Analytics, IDC. "The combination of new flash-based storage with higher-performing, new-generation analytic database platforms like ParAccel will speed access to data-driven intelligence and enable organizations to improve tactical, operational, and strategic decision-making."

The ParAccel Analytic Appliance includes reference configurations that run on commodity servers such as those from Dell, HP, IBM and Sun. ParAccel also offers a SAN-attached appliance, the Scalable Analytic Appliance (SAA) II, which also supports the option of incorporating Fusion’s new flash memory cache into the compute nodes. SAA leverages ParAccel’s new patent-pending Blended Scan technology to dramatically improve SAN-based analytic processing performance by balancing I/O and storage across compute nodes and the SAN. This approach, unavailable with any other analytic appliance, leverages the customer’s existing enterprise infrastructure for data management, high availability, disaster recovery and backups.

"Today’s solid-state technologies represent an incredible leap forward in both performance and reliability, and many businesses, especially those with very intense operational requirements and high demand for complex data exploration, are seeing the value proposition," said Barry Zane, Founder and Chief Technology Officer, ParAccel. "Our ParAccel Analytic Appliance slashes technical and resource barriers to adoption of advanced analytics and dramatically accelerates both intensively data-driven operational applications and difficult ad hoc queries that lead to timely insight for informed decisions. We designed ParAccel to outperform other platforms using standard hardware and therefore are uniquely positioned to leverage hardware technology advances as they occur."