Aster Data, a provider of data warehousing solutions for "big data" applications, yesterday announced Aster Data Version 4.0, which the company describes as the industry's first "Massively Parallel Data-Application Server." Aster Data 4.0 allows companies to embed applications inside Aster Data's MPP (massively parallel processing) data warehouse, so businesses can now store, analyze and speed processing of terabytes to petabytes of data. The ability to push applications down into the MPP database also opens a new opportunity for companies to deliver new interactive, big data applications.
According to Aster Data, traditional data warehouses, DBMS and analytics solutions of the last two decades have separated data from applications, resulting in large data movement, high latency and restricted data analysis. With today's massive amounts of data, moving large amounts of data to an external application is often not an ideal option because of the multiple architectural tiers that the data must move through. Aster Data 4.0 seeks to deliver a breakthrough that brings together data and application processing in one system, fully parallelizing both, to enable fast, sophisticated analysis on massive data scales.
Aster Data's Massively Parallel Data-Application Server 4.0 allows companies to embed application logic within Aster's MPP database, allowing dramatically faster, deep analysis on massive data scales. The unique aspect of this architecture is that within the system, data management lives independently from application processing, but critical to the architecture is that both data and applications exist as first class citizens and each have their respective data and application management services to deliver the highest performance and availability. The Data-Application Server is responsible for the management and coordination of activities and sharing of resources in the cluster. It additionally acts as a host for the application processing and data that is managed inside the cluster.
Sharmila Shahani-Mulligan, executive vice president of worldwide marketing for Aster Data, tells 5 Minute Briefing that "within the Data-Application Server, the application is not bolted on to the data engine, but rather has its own container such that the data and application can be treated as equal citizens and the application has maximum portability. This way, both the data and the application benefit equally from the system's resource and workload management processes. Also, both custom and packaged applications can be pushed down into the MPP database for faster analytics, with no rewriting of the applications required."
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