Vexata And Supermicro Enable New Levels Of Performance And Efficiency For Active Data Analytics

SAN JOSE, Calif., July 20, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- #Vexata (@VexataRTA), the leader in active data storage solutions, announced today a partnership with #Supermicro® to develop solutions for #Microsoft® #SQL Server #DataWarehouse (DW) deployments showcasing industry leading data analytics with Vexata arrays. Enterprises deploy SQL Server-based data warehouses to gain insights into historical data and report on important business metrics. As enterprises strive to reduce time to insight and actions, real time analytics and reporting are becoming a necessity, and existing data infrastructures that are based on distributed batch analytics are too slow and inefficient. A high-performance SQL Server data warehouse that can address hundreds of TBs of data is a critical business tool to access all active data. "With the increasing importance of data-driven business decisions and the explosion in the scale and types of data collected," says Zahid Hussain, CEO of Vexata, "there is an ever growing need for enterprises to focus on active data analytics. Our technology partnership with Supermicro helps us build in greater performance capabilities into our arrays that we can showcase with reference solutions using Supermicro servers." With Vexata Arrays incorporating the new Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and solid-state drives, along with Supermicro X11 SuperServer® solutions, enterprises can derive greater performance, scalability and security out of their data platforms. Vexata works closely with Supermicro to provide solution reference designs for Oracle, SQL Server, Kx and GPFS that deliver an orders of magnitude performance improvement over similar reference designs from other All Flash Array (AFA) vendors. "Supermicro's SuperServer combined with Vexata's data management layer provides a leading-edge solution for data warehouse users," said Michael McNerney, Vice President Software Solutions and Infrastructure, Supermicro. "The Vexata solution which achieved over 35 GB/s of mixed read/write bandwidth provides a significant market advantage."
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/vexata-and-supermicro-enable-new-levels-of-performance-and-efficiency-for-active-data-analytics-300491262.html

Cask Shortens Time-to-Value for Data-Driven Applications on Apache Spark and Hadoop

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - June 07, 2017) - #SparkSummit -- #Cask (cask.co), the company that makes building and deploying big data solutions easy, today at Spark Summit San Francisco announced the newest release of #Cask Data Application Platform (CDAP), version 4.2. #CDAP 4.2 delivers expanded support for #Spark and enhanced, user-centric self-service data ingestion and preparation capabilities. It also expands the pre-built and easy-to-deploy solutions in Cask Market to include #ChangeDataCapture (CDC) support for #SQL Server and #Oracle. These new capabilities will help accelerate user productivity in #Spark and #Hadoop projects, reducing initial time to value and time to production for #bigdata solutions significantly. "Simplified code development, workload flexibility and faster data processing have generated huge interest in Spark", said Jonathan Gray, Cask founder and CEO. "But as is the case with many other big data technologies, operationalizing Spark and scaling workloads from prototype to production present their own set of challenges for IT teams, greatly extending timelines and often putting the success of projects at risk. With broad support for Spark and increasingly code-free, interactive data integration capabilities, this latest release of CDAP dramatically shortens the time to prepare and ingest data and to test, run and deploy Spark data pipelines on that data. This means simplified onboarding, better productivity and faster time to production for data lakes and data-driven applications on Spark and Hadoop." CDAP 4.2 adds support for Spark 2.x, which includes the new DataFrame/DataSet/SQL APIs, as well as the new Spark2 runtime. As a result, CDAP users will be able to easily upgrade their Spark programs from Spark 1.x to Spark 2.x. Furthermore, when building a data pipeline, or exporting a data pipeline from their CDAP SDK environment to a cluster, users will not have to be concerned with the version of Spark running on the target cluster. CDAP 4.2 also adds a new, interactive experience for Spark developers, enabling them to add custom Spark transformation logic to a data pipeline, run the code and get results from it quickly, all directly from the user interface. CDAP 4.2 introduces a new user-centric, self-service data preparation workflow that allows users to easily connect to existing data sources, offers them simple point-and-click interactive data preparation to transform data, and provides push button operationalization of ingestion and transformation work as production pipelines. Additional enhancements in CDAP 4.2 include advanced scheduling capabilities designed to boost scalability and flexibility in production environments. The new, more scalable CDAP scheduler allows for data-driven schedules, event-based triggers, and the definition of constraints that can be used to triage multiple jobs running on the same cluster. The Cask Market update for CDAP 4.2 offers new, pre-built assets, expanding the list of reusable, ready-to-use big data solutions and components available for push button deployment. Introducing EDW Offload as a pre-built, packaged solution in Cask Market with CDAP 4.1, Cask Market now offers real-time Change Data Capture (CDC) for SQL Server and Oracle with Spark Streaming, enabling data to be in sync between the source databases and Hadoop. This allows CDAP users to use Change Data Capture instead of traditional ETL for their EDW Offload workloads, improving efficiency while reducing latency of the data extracted from their source data systems. In addition to CDC, Cask Market now also features XSD-based, complex XML readers as well as connectors for Apache Kafka, Apache Kudu, HP Vertica and others. "Enterprises derive the most value from Hadoop and Spark with configurable data applications. Yet these applications can be hard to create, and even harder to manage in production settings", said John L. Myers, Managing Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates, a Boulder, CO-based analysis firm. "CDAP 4.2 encapsulates the complexity and difficulties of the do-it-yourself approach from organizations. This approach empowers companies to tackle big data applications from data prep to production implementation quickly and speed time to implementation.

http://m.marketwired.com/press-release/cask-shortens-time-to-value-for-data-driven-applications-on-apache-spark-and-hadoop-2220578.htm

Microsoft’s Old-School Database Was the Surprise Software Hit of the Year

DON’T CALL IT a comeback, but #Microsoft ’s #database software may be seeing a resurgence. According to research conducted by the Austrian consulting company Solid IT, #MicrosoftSQL Server’s popularity grew faster than any other database product the company tracked on its DB-Engines site during 2016. That’s good news for Microsoft because, despite holding tight to the number three spot in the rankings for the past few years, SQL Server’s popularity had been waning. Now it’s on the rise, and Microsoft’s long-deferred embrace of open source software may deserve a lot of the credit.

https://www.wired.com/2017/01/microsofts-old-school-database-surprise-software-hit-year/

Microsoft announces 16 years of support for Windows, SQL Servers

#Microsoft 's announced a new “ #PremiumAssurance ” plan for #WindowsServer and #SQLServer. Redmond currently offers five years of Mainstream Support on the aforementioned products, during which new features are added and updates are made for reasons of security or just to fix things up. Next comes five years of extended support, during which the security fixes and functionality tweaks keep flowing. The new support offering will see bugs rated “critical” or “important” patched for the six-year duration of the Premium Assurance plan. The outcome of the new plan is that operating systems like Windows Server 2008 R2 will now be supported until the year 2026. SQL Server 2008 can now be supported until 2025. Microsoft's billing Premium Assurance as a comfort to those running applications that may not be easy to evaporate into a cloud. By offering extended support, Redmond reckons, you can just keep them running without worrying about migration. Premium Assurance goes on sale early in 2017 and Pricing suggests Microsoft wants you to buy this product sooner rather than later: if you sign between March and June 2017, it will cost you five per cent of your current licence costs. Delay until July 2019 and that figure rises to 12 per cent. A datasheet (PDF) explains the costs in detail. One last thing: the post announcing Premium Assurance includes the following nuggetoid of information: “The next version of Windows Server is currently in planning, and will further advance the Windows Server 2016 capabilities around hybrid cloud, multi-layered security, containers, Nano Server, and software-defined datacenter technology. Whether that's a reference to a second edition for Windows Server 2016 or a full release isn't explained. Either way, news Microsoft has more on-premises innovation on the way will hearten those who worry that operating system innovation may have stalled in the age of the cloud. ®

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/12/microsoft_announces_16_years_of_support_for_windows_sql_servers/

Cloudera makes Navigator Optimizer available, releases Enterprise 5.8

California-based #Cloudera that designs open source technologies and develops apache hadoop-based enterprise analytic data management software, has announced the general availability of Cloudera Navigator Optimizer, alongside the release of Cloudera Enterprise 5.8. Since its limited beta release in November 2015, Cloudera Navigation Optimizer aims to aid customers augment their analytic database or data warehouse solution with #Hadoop and help offload SQL workloads for more efficient analytics processing. Posing as the newest update to Cloudera’s Big Data solutions and offerings, the optimization tool claims to provide database administrators (DBAs) the usage visibility to manage Hadoop data models and guidance to optimize query performance. In a company blog, Cloudera stated that it has helped customers “offload ETL (extract, transform and load) processes, Business Intelligence (BI) reports, ad-hoc workloads to Cloudera’s Hadoop platform,” after profiling and analyzing workloads for customers in identifying potential risks and optimizing data model to support various data needs. Reportedly, it evaluates structured query language (SQL) text in large, complex #SQL workloads so users can gain an in-depth understanding of their workloads, identify queries best-suited for Hadoop and modify them as needed for optimal efficiency via an easy-to-use web user interface. Its built-in optimization guidance for #Apache #Hive and Apache #Impala (incubating), a SQL engine also enables peak in performance for faster data preparation, BI and exploratory analytics, claims the company.

http://techseen.com/2016/07/25/cloudera-navigator-optimizer-enterprise-5-8/

Microsoft Analytics, Intel IoT, Spokeo Vs. Robins: Big Data Roundup

#Microsoft updated its CRM and #SQL offerings and Intel showcased its IoT efforts. Meanwhile, the #USSupremeCourt is weighing questions about the liability companies have in ensuring the accuracy of consumer data. Learn about this and more in our #BigData Roundup for the week of Nov. 6.

Microsoft has analytics updates coming to several products soon, and Intel announced enhancements to its Internet of Things (IoT) initiatives this week. Those were among the big stories in big data for the week ending Nov. 6, along with more from #Tableau, #MongoDB and others. We also saw the US Supreme Court begin exploring liability questions related to consumer data.

First let's look at the Microsoft news. Microsoft is changing its #DynamicsCRM 2016 technology to include #AzureMachineLearning, among other new capabilities. The update will integrate new capabilities into Dynamics CRM to help businesses provide a fast, effective customer experience, Microsoft told InformationWeek. This technology will learn from the experiences customer service representatives have with customers in order to improve the knowledge base from which they can draw to handle future calls.

Microsoft also announced the start of a public preview of its In-Memory #OLTP and Real-Time Operational Analytics in Azure SQL Database. Microsoft wrote in a blog post that the updates provide improved speed of performance for business applications and enable scaling to support an increased numbers of users. Microsoft said that customers, including #Samsung, #Dell, and #Progressive, have achieved up to 30x transactional performance gains.

[Dell is offering its #Statistica software for free to US colleage students. Read Dell's Statistica Revamped, Free To College Students.]

#Intel IoT
Intel hosted an IoT event earlier this week to showcase its customers' initiatives, For example, the company highlighted an IoT pilot it conducted with San Francisco-based #LeviStrauss & Co. which placed sensors with barcode readers on clothing displays to feed inventory data to a cloud repository. Intel also used the event to update progress on its #QuarkSystem on Chip device, which is used in wearables. Check out the full story here.

MongoDB 3.2 Released
#MongoDB released version 3.2 of its NoSQL database. The company said in a statement that the update "expands MongoDB to new users within the enterprise by deeply integrating with the modern CIO's technology stack." Version 3.2 includes new storage engines for encrypted storage and in-memory storage.

http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/big-data-analytics/microsoft-analytics-intel-iot-spokeo-vs-robins-big-data-roundup/d/d-id/1323047