IBM and DB2
Analysis of IBM and various of its product lines in database management, analytics, and data integration.
- Cognos
- solidDB
- (in The Monash Report) Operational and strategic issues for IBM
- (in Text Technologies) IBM in the text analytics market
- (in Software Memories) Historical notes on IBM
- (in Software Memories) Historical notes on Informix
DB2 OLTP scale-out: pureScale
Tim Vincent of IBM talked me through DB2 pureScale Monday. IBM DB2 pureScale is a kind of shared-disk scale-out parallel OTLP DBMS, with some interesting twists. IBM’s scalability claims for pureScale, on a 90% read/10% write workload, include:
- 95% scalability up to 64 machines
- 90% scalability up to 88 machines
- 89% scalability up to 112 machines
- 84% scalability up to 128 machines
More precisely, those are counts of cluster “members,” but the recommended configuration is one member per operating system instance — i.e. one member per machine — for reasons of availability. In an 80% read/20% write workload, scalability is less — perhaps 90% scalability over 16 members.
Several elements are of IBM’s DB2 pureScale architecture are pretty straightforward:
- There are multiple pureScale members (machines), each with its own instance of DB2.
- There’s an RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) interconnect, perhaps InfiniBand. (The point of InfiniBand and other RDMA is that moving data doesn’t require interrupts, and hence doesn’t cost many CPU cycles.)
- The DB2 pureScale members share access to the database on a disk array.
- Each DB2 pureScale member has its own log, also on the disk array.
Something called GPFS (Global Parallel File System), which comes bundled with DB2, sits underneath all this. It’s all based on the mainframe technology IBM Parallel Sysplex.
The weirdest part (to me) of DB2 pureScale is something called the Global Cluster Facility, which runs on its own set of boxes. (Edit: Actually, see Tim Vincent’s comment below.) Read more
| Categories: Cache, Clustering, IBM and DB2, OLTP, Oracle | 15 Comments |
IBM InfoSphere Warehouse pricing, packaging, compression and more
IBM InfoSphere Warehouse 9.7.3 has been announced, and is planned for general availability late this month. IBM InfoSphere Warehouse is, in essence, DB2-plus, where the “plus” comprises:
- DPF (Data Partitioning Feature) — i.e., the ability to do shared-nothing scale-out.
- Unimportant add-ons — e.g., a mere 5 seats of the Cognos BI tool.
The main news in this release of InfoSphere Warehouse is probably pricing. While IBM has long had a funky server-power-based pricing scheme, it is now adding per-terabyte pricing, with a twist: IBM InfoSphere Warehouse now can be bought per terabyte of compressed user data. Specifically:
- IBM InfoSphere Warehouse 9.7.3 Enterprise Edition can be bought for production for $70K or so per terabyte of compressed user data.
- IBM InfoSphere Warehouse 9.7.3 Departmental Edition can be bought for production for $35K or so per terabyte of compressed user data.
- Development/test seats of IBM InfoSphere Warehouse cost about $2K per user.
- High availability/disaster recovery instances are priced as if they were managing 1 TB each — unless, of course, you have an active-active configuration, in which case they’re priced according to their full amount of data.
Per-terabyte pricing is generally a good way to think about analytic DBMS costs, for at least two reasons: Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, Database compression, IBM and DB2, Pricing | 1 Comment |
Oracle and IBM workload management
When last night’s Oracle/Exadata post got too long — and before I knew Oracle would request a different section be cut — I set aside my comments on Oracle’s workload management story to post separately. Elements of Oracle’s workload management story include:
- Oracle’s workload management product is called Oracle Database Resource Manager.
- Oracle Database Resource Manager has long managed CPU. For Exadata, Oracle added in management of I/O. Management of RAM is coming.
- Another aspect of Oracle workload management is “instance caging.” If you’re running multiple instances of Oracle on the same box – e.g. one with 128 cores and thus 256 threads – instance caging can keep an instance confined to a specific number of threads.
- Policies can let some classes of user get access to more threads in Oracle Parallel Query than others do.*
- Oracle offers a QoS (Quality of Service) layer, at least on Exadata, that tries to use Oracle’s workload management capabilities to enforce SLAs (Service Level Agreements). For example, if you want a certain query to always be answered in no more than 0.3 seconds, it tries to make that happen. However, this technology is new in the current Oracle release, and will be enhanced going forward.
*Recall that “degrees of parallelism” in Oracle Parallel Query can now be set automagically.
One reason I split out this discussion of workload management is that I also talked with IBM’s Tim Vincent yesterday, who added some insight to what I already wrote last August about DB2/InfoSphere Warehouse workload management. Specifically:
- DB2/InfoSphere Warehouse workload management has multiple ways to manage use of CPU resources.
- DB2/InfoSphere Warehouse workload management doesn’t directly manage consumption of I/O or RAM resources. However, it can influence usage of I/O or RAM by:
- Limiting the number or rows read or returned.
- Adjusting priorities as to which queries get to prefetch the most records.
- DB2/InfoSphere Warehouse workload management doesn’t allow you to directly set an SLA mandating query response time. However, if query response times exceed a target SLA, DB2/InfoSphere Warehouse workload management can cause a statistics dump that might help you tune your way out of the problem.
| Categories: Data warehousing, IBM and DB2, Oracle, Workload management | Leave a Comment |
Netezza TwinFin i-Class overview
I have long complained about difficulties in discussing Netezza’s TwinFin i-Class analytic platform. But I’m ready now, and in the grand sweep of the product’s history I’m not even all that late. The Netezza i-Class timing story goes something like this:
- Netezza i-Class was first foreshadowed in February, 2010.
- Netezza i-Class customer testing started in October, 2010 or so. Netezza i-Class evidently has been shipped to 4-5 partners and a single-digit number of end-user organizations, spread across some usual-suspect industries (financial services, telecom, and so on).
- Netezza i-Class 1.0 general availability is still in the (near) future.
My advice to Netezza as to how it should describe TwinFin i-Class boils down to: Read more
| Categories: Cloudera, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, GIS and geospatial, Hadoop, IBM and DB2, MapReduce, Netezza, Parallelization, Predictive modeling and advanced analytics | 5 Comments |
ANTs Software updates
I drafted the partial post quoted below some months ago, but never finished it, as my general posting hiatus hit. Anyhow, I just thought of ANTs again, due to a LinkedIn request from an exec, and it came back to mind. Subsequent news includes that the product had to be temporarily pulled from the market (what a shock), there was $200,000 of IBM revenue through the end of 2010 (by ANTs’ standards, that’s a lot), and at some point three Sybase-to-IBM product sales actually got closed.
ANTs Software recently came (back) to my attention when, ego-surfing, I saw they had made up some falsehoods about me and posted same in their blog. So I posted about ANTs Software. Now that the ANTs Software blog is on my radar, I see there’s another post from CEO Joe Kozak stating his case that ANTs Software is a good investment. I also notice that there’s an active S-1 to sell ANTs Software stock, dated two weeks before the blog post. Frankly, it surprises me that it’s legal to recommend your own stock that emphatically while you’re in registration — but hey, I tend to be on the side of favoring more communication over less.
According to the ANTs Software 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, ANTs Software has >$2 million in negative working capital — which this offering apparently won’t change (it’s for a shareholder to sell stock, not for ANTs to raise more money for itself).
Actually, ANTs did manage to get its working capital positive again. The key paragraph from the 10-K linked above, emphasis mine, is
The consolidated financial statements contemplate continuation of the Company as a going concern. However, the Company has had minimal revenues since inception, suffered recurring losses from operations, has generated negative cash flows from operations and has an accumulated deficit of $156.97 million as of December 31, 2010 that raise substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern. The Company also had significant near-term liquidity needs as of December 31, 2010, including $0.25 million currently due on a line of credit and $2.00 million in notes payable due January 31, 2011. Subsequent to December 31, 2010, the Company received proceeds from a $3.00 million subscription receivable (less $0.39 million in fees, including $0.24 million in dispute) for the sale of 5.18 million shares of common stock pursuant to the BRG Agreement, $0.06 million in proceeds from the exercise of warrants covering 0.13 million shares of common stock and gross proceeds of $0.75 million from the Note and Warrant Purchase Agreements. The outstanding balance on the line of credit was subsequently repaid and the notes payable were subsequently deferred until January 31, 2013. The Company’s ability to continue as a going concern is dependent upon management’s ability to generate profitable operations in the future and obtain the necessary financing to meet obligations and repay liabilities arising from normal business operations when they come due. The Company anticipates generating profitable operations from marketing and sales of ACS and the growth of our Professional Services offerings for ACS implementations. If the Company does not generate profitable operations or obtain the necessary financing, the Company may not have enough operating funds to continue to operate as a going concern. Securing additional sources of financing to enable the Company to continue the development and commercialization of proprietary technologies will be difficult and there is no assurance of our ability to secure such financing. A failure to generate profitable operations or obtain additional financing could prevent the Company from making expenditures that are needed to pay current obligations, allow the hiring of additional development personnel and continue development of its software and technologies. The Company continues actively seeking additional capital through private placements of equity and debt.
Bottom line: $157 million in losses have produced 3 sales (with more presumably coming) of a product that isn’t that important in the first place (it just helps you move from a perfectly decent DBMS to one you might like better while saving on migration costs). That makes almost any other failure in software industry history look like a rousing success by comparison.
| Categories: ANTs Software, IBM and DB2, Sybase | 6 Comments |
Updating our vendor client disclosures
Edit: This disclosure has been superseded by a March, 2012 version.
From time to time, I disclose our vendor client lists. Another iteration is below. To be clear:
- This is a list of Monash Advantage members.
- All our vendor clients are Monash Advantage members, unless …
- … we work with them primarily in their capacity as technology users. (A large fraction of our user clients happen to be SaaS vendors.)
- We do not usually disclose our user clients.
- We do not usually disclose our venture capital clients, nor those who invest in publicly-traded securities.
- Included in the list below are two expired Monash Advantage members who haven’t said they will renew, as mentioned in my recent post on analyst bias. (You can probably imagine a couple of reasons for that obfuscation.)
With that said, our vendor client disclosures at this time are:
- Aster Data
- Cloudera
- CodeFutures/dbShards
- Couchbase
- EMC/Greenplum
- Endeca
- IBM/Netezza
- Infobright
- Intel
- MarkLogic
- ParAccel
- QlikTech
- salesforce.com/database.com
- SAND Technology
- SAP/Sybase
- Schooner Information Technology
- Skytide
- Splunk
- Teradata
- Vertica
Notes and links October 22, 2010
A number of recent posts have had good comments. This time, I won’t call them out individually.
Evidently Mike Olson of Cloudera is still telling the machine-generated data story, exactly as he should be. The Information Arbitrage/IA Ventures folks said something similar, focusing specifically on “sensor data” …
… and, even better, went on to say: Read more
Evidently IBM bought Cast Iron Systems for $190 million
Sequoia told TechCrunch that Cast Iron Systems was acquired for $190 million. That’s a much more successful exit than I thought.
| Categories: Cast Iron Systems, Data integration and middleware, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, IBM and DB2 | 2 Comments |
Further thoughts on previous posts
One thing I love about DBMS 2 is the really smart comments a number of readers — that would be you guys — make. However, not all the smart comments are made in the first 5 minutes a post is up, so some readers (unless you circle back) might miss great points other readers make. Well, here are some pointers to some of what you might have missed, along with other follow-up comments to old posts while I’m at it. Read more
| Categories: About this blog, Calpont, IBM and DB2, Netezza, Oracle, SAS Institute | Leave a Comment |
Some thoughts on the announcement that IBM is buying Netezza
As you’ve probably read, IBM and Netezza announced a deal today for IBM to buy Netezza. I didn’t sit in on the conference call, but I’ve seen the reporting. Naturally, I have some quick thoughts, which I’ve broken up into several sections below:
- Clearing some underbrush.
- Speculation about what IBM/Netezza will do.
- Speculation about alternative acquirers for Netezza.
- Speculation about what IBM/Netezza competitors will do.