A bit of insider perspective – part I: my take on the Greenplum deal

Normally, I try to keep the discussions on the blog technology focused, but getting questions on this one, so wanted to put my 2 cents out there, just like I shared with the vSpecialist team internally. 

What is going on here?   Well, here are my cliff-notes on it.

The database market is being disrupted in both major areas:

1. OLTP/Web App – here, customers at the very high end are hitting core RDBMS scaling limits forcing them into exotic hardware away from x86.  Disruption and innovation is occurring to fill the vacuum.
2. BI/DW – here, bulk load and query throughput are forcing customers to abandon their desire for mass-commoditization and leverage of x86 and virtualization trend (“horizontal virtualization”) towards BI/DW appliances that don't match their general infrastructure plans (“verticalization”).  Disruption and innovation is occurring to fill the vacuum.

EMC and VMware (and others) are arming for battle on multiple separate, but related fronts.

• Gemstone (recently acquired by VMware) coupled with Redis (open source, with key contributors joining VMware – here also) are disruptors for OLTP use cases.   The disruption is occuring via in memory, NoSQL scale out models (Redis is an example of one of the pieces here – in-memory key value store), coupled with in-memory distributed data management  (Gemstone has key technologies here).   These ideas forgo locking and other traditional semantics in RDBMS-land, so aren’t for everyone, and aren’t for every use case. These require new apps to be written expecting that model, so it makes more sense as part of SpringSource.
• GreenPlum  (recently acquired by EMC) is a disruptor for BI/DW oriented use cases. These use cases CAN be done at the infrastructure part of the stack (ergo don’t demand application level-change), and can have a ton of infrastructure-layer optimization, can be implemented via appliance approaches (but in Greenplum’s case – appliances that match where customers are looking to go – with scale-out with commodity hardware and pervasive virtualization.   That’s all possible because transformation is part of the BI/DW process. All these reasons mean that there is a strong EMC fit.

BOTH Gemstone and Greenplum leverage and are amplified by the trends of virtualization, scale out, commodity hardware and cloud operational models - all aligned with EMC and VMware's technologies, and Private Cloud vision.

Simple, beautiful moves, IMO (though I’m sure I’m biased) - now can we pull it off?