With New Appliance, EMC Takes on Teradata, Oracle

In spring 2010, Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC Corp. started talking to data warehousing software company Greenplum about a potential partnership. The idea was pretty simple: Develop a new appliance that would be powered by general-purpose Intel processors and marry storage, compute and massively scalable database and analytics and sell it as a more affordable competitor to Oracle’s Exadata and Teradata’s warehousing products.

The casual alliance led to eventual acquisition of Greenplum for a rumored $400 million and 75 days later, EMC is introducing the first of these data warehousing appliances that start at a million dollars and can cost much more, depending on the size and scale of the device. “We are going to go head-to-head with Oracle’s Exadata and Teradata,” said Scott Yara, formerly of Greenplum, who now heads up Data Computing Products Division, a business group set up to target the big money opportunities being offered by the big data revolution.

The new EMC Greenplum Data Computing Appliance is built using Greenplum Database 4.0 and runs on a system that is build with 16 Intel processors. “Its innovative parallel-everything architecture delivers data loading performance of 10 terabytes (TB) an hour, twice as fast as Oracle Exadata systems and five times as fast as systems from Netezza and Teradata,” EMC claims in a press release. The company is targeting financial exchanges, large telecom operators and big retailers with this new appliance, Yara said.

Yara points out that these devices are part of EMC’s big plan for tapping the big data market. The company currently has about 160 people working in that division. The plan is to grow it to 600 employees by end of 2011.