News

Pivotal Creates Big Data Suite Subscription Offering

• By David Ramel
• April 3, 2014

Pivotal Software Inc. has combined a host of data technologies into a new Big Data Suite offered on a subscription basis.

The 1 year old Pivotal, a cloud and Big Data vendor created as a spin-off between EMC Corp. and VMware Inc., yesterday announced the new product was a bundling of software, support and maintenance. Products in the package, as described by the company, include:

• Pivotal Greenplum Database -- "a purpose-built, dedicated analytic data warehouse designed to extract value from your data."
• Pivotal GemFire -- "a real-time distributed data store that solves the hard problems of distributed systems, [providing] a familiar Java interface for interacting with data of arbitrary complexity and shape."
• Pivotal SQLFire -- "a real-time distributed data store [using the familiar SQL interface that] accommodates ever-growing data sets and users with linear scalability, continuous uptime and predictable performance."
• Pivotal GemFire XD -- "an in-memory data platform delivering speed and dynamic scalability, together with the reliability and data management capabilities of a traditional database."
• Pivotal HAWQ -- "a parallel SQL query engine that combines the key technological advantages of the ... Pivotal Analytic Database with the scalability and convenience of Hadoop."
• Pivotal HD -- "a 100 percent Apache-compatible Hadoop distribution featuring a fully SQL-compliant query engine for processing data stored in Hadoop."

Pivotal said its combination of traditional and new data infrastructure technologies is a "Business Data Lake." Figure 1 shows the Big Data Suite architecture.

"The Pivotal Big Data Suite fills a much-needed gap in the market, helping enterprise companies to capitalize on explosive data growth by offering a multi-faceted data portfolio with a 'use it as you need it' pricing model," Pivotal said. "Per-core pricing ensures that data that is simply being stored is not taxed, which will be important as enterprises seek to consolidate more and more information into a Business Data Lake."

The per-core pricing model is available in two- or three-year terms with a cumulative contract minimum. Pivotal said potential customers should contact the company for exact pricing.