Kickfire, Inc., a provider of affordable, high performance analytic appliances, has entered into the Partner Network with Rackspace Hosting, a leader in hosting and cloud computing, to deliver affordable, high-performance analytic appliance hosting and managed services. By joining the network, Kickfire can provide its customers with access to Rackspace's fully managed hosting and 24x7 Fanatical Support services. The two companies will also participate in joint sales and marketing programs.

The relationship between Kickfire and Rackspace will be well-suited to organizations with tight budgets and resources, according to the vendors. A hosted analytic appliance solution will decrease the time to deploy and will also remove the need for dedicated administrators or around-the-clock staff.

"Most data warehouse and appliance vendors are trying to scale-up performance using an MPP approach," Bruce Armstrong, CEO of Kickfire, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "Kickfire's strategy is to improve performance by removing bottlenecks. The first bottleneck is I/O and Kickfire is reducing I/O requirements with its column-based architecture. Secondly, we are reducing CPU processing bottlenecks by having designed a chip that is optimized for processing data rather than instruction sets. Now, through our partnership with Rackspace, we are also offering on-demand business intelligence and analytics."

LiveRail Inc., a video advertising start-up headquartered in San Francisco, Calif., delivers technology solutions that enable and enhance the monetization of internet-distributed video and is the first joint customer of Kickfire and Rackspace. The company utilizes a MySQL-based data warehouse with data volumes growing in excess of 30GB per month and is using Kickfire's high-performance analytic appliance to dramatically improve its query performance and Rackspace to host, service and support the environment.

For more information about Kickfire, go here.
For more information about Rackspace, go here.