EMC Intends to Expand Big Data Computing with Greenplum Buy

By Irina Guseva (@irina_guseva) Jul 7, 2010 Comments

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Although influenced by multiple Enterprise CMS passion attacks, in its heart, EMC (news, site) has always been a data storage/management company. Having experience with managing large content/case/records assets in the enterprise is part of the attraction.

With the upcoming acquisition of a privately-held, data warehousing company Greenplum, it's becoming even clearer where EMC's true heart desires lie — on the intersection of big data computing and business analytics.

Current EMC Landscape

Aside from EMC's ECM efforts with:

Documentum Enterprise CMS (now known as the Information Intelligence Group (IIG))
GRC with EMC SourceOne family of products
eDiscovery via Kazeon acquisition
Records management

the company is largely concerned with a lot of the following:

Information infrastructure solutions
Security through RSA
Backup, recovery and archiving viaDataDomain acquisition
Virtualized infra (VMWare included)

Why is EMC attracted to Greenplum? Best summed up in big words of Pat Gelsinger, president and COO, EMC Information Infrastructure Products:

The data warehousing world is about to change. Greenplum's massively-parallel, scale-out architecture, along with its self-service consumption model, has enabled it to separate itself from the incumbent players and… shift toward 'big data' analytics.

What Greenplum Brings to the Table?

Well, all things "big" data. And big analytics and business intelligence. Not the FatWire level of analytics. A lot more than that.

As we all know by now, we live in the world beyond terabytes, at least petabytes, moving into yottabytes of data. And it just continues to grow. While this is hardly a "big data" phenomenon anymore, many organizations still are looking for ways to manage those mounts of data efficiently.

And, more importantly, they're looking to be able to analyze that data.

Greenplum has this nifty "shared-nothing" massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture that has been designed for analytical processing in virtualized x86 infrastructures. Coincidentally, EMC’s storage products are x86-based as well.

Greenplum Architecture

As Greenplum notes:

In this architecture, data is automatically partitioned across multiple 'segment' servers, and each 'segment' owns and manages a distinct portion of the overall data. All communication is via a network interconnect — there is no disk-level sharing or contention to be concerned with (i.e. it is a 'shared-nothing' architecture).

Then, there's a MapReduce integration allowing developers and DBAs to execute both MapReduce and SQL in Greenplum’s parallel dataflow engine. When there's MapReduce, there's an ability to run analytics on petabytes of data — in our outside of Greenplum's database.