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New Case Studies – Guess? and Kansys

by csmith on • in Customers

There are two new case studies posted on the site – Guess? and Kansys – and they offer two very different stories about how these world-class companies are using Big Data as a competitive differentiator in the retail and service provider industries.  But there is one common thread between the two stories – the HP Vertica Analytics Platform.

You can check out the stories by going to the Customer Case Studies page, but I wanted to give you a short description of the company and a quote for each story to entice you to check them out:

Guess?, Inc., a leading global retailer, is achieving business and technology benefits with its HP Vertica Analytics Platform that includes a flexible, compelling mobile business analytics iPad application called G-Mobile. The easy-to-use mobile app empowers a range of non-traditional BI users including designers, buyers, planners, and allocators—to analyze sales, inventory and logistical information. The company has improved its insight into customer purchasing behaviors, and can ensure employee resources are allocated appropriately to optimize productivity. With HP Vertica, Guess? has the infrastructure in place to tackle the challenges retailers face—including Big Data and next-generation analytics. The company plans to roll out the analytics platform to Europe and Asia in the near future.

“Vertica gives us the flexibility to tackle Big Data. With HP Vertica, our organization is ready for the challenges retailers are facing—from Big Data to next-generation analytics.”
– Bruce Yen, director, Business Intelligence, Guess?, Inc.

Founded in 1997, Kansys brings deep experience and expertise to the business support systems and operations support systems (BSS/OSS) for Communications Service Providers (CSPs) & Multiple System Operators (MSOs). The company is known for an unparalleled ability to align, manage, optimize, and report on huge volumes of data from disparate sources for its clients.With expertise gathered over years of experience, Kansys is unique in its depth of knowledge across the areas that matter to CSPs — Mediation, Process Optimization, Revenue Assurance, Fraud Detection & Analysis, Billing, Audits, Customer Analytics, and Reporting. HP Vertica powers the CSP & MSO Big Data services provided by Kansys to their customers.

“As a consumer of data, time to information is important, and we don’t want to be limited in the amount of data we process. HP Vertica solves that problem.”
– Tom Wisnasky, CIO, Kansys

To check out these two case studies, and to learn more about Guess?, Kansys, and some of our other customers who are taking full advantage of the HP Vertica Analytics Platform, please visit the Customer page on our web site.

HP Vertica helps secure HP’s IT infrastructure

by csmith on • in HP IT, security

Click image for case study

HP’s online security strategy is designed to protect its infrastructure from hackers, fraud, and malware. The cyber security model includes prevention, detection, and response, and incorporates a number of key HP solutions from the HP IT Performance Suite — Security Intelligence and Risk Management portfolio. These HP solutions help HP’s security professionals respond more quickly and efficiently to events — despite the complexity of HP’s IT infrastructure.

HP Vertica figures prominently in the HP IT cyber security story as part of the Lancope StealthWatch solution.  Lancope StealthWatch is a network monitoring tool that leverages the HP Vertica Analytics Platform to provides HP’s network security team with a cost-effective, yet powerful, way to monitor and analyze HP’s network traffic, delivering network-based anomaly detection.

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GameStop CIO: Hadoop Isn’t For Everyone

by csmith on • in Hadoop, Vertica Customers

GameStop Corp. is the world’s largest multichannel video game retailer, with a retail network and family of brands that includes 6,650 company-operated stores in 15 countries worldwide and online at www.GameStop.com. The network also includes:  www.Kongregate.com, a leading browser-based game site; Game Informer® magazine, the leading multi-platform video game publication; Spawn Labs, a streaming technology company; and a digital PC game distribution platform available at http://www.GameStop.com/PC.

As part of their efforts to upgrade their analytics infrastructure to handle the massive traffic from their 21 million member PowerUp Rewards™ loyalty membership program, GameStop looked at Hadoop to see if the open source platform would handle their Big Data requirements.  Ultimately, GameStop CIO Jeff Donaldson chose the HP Vertica Analytics Platform because his engineers, who are trained in working with traditional data warehousing solutions that use the SQL programming language, would be able to quickly transition to the open, standards-based HP Vertica Analytics Platform.

Recently, GameStop was featured in an article by Clint Boulton, reporter for the the Wall Street Journal’s CIO Journal.  In the article, “GameStop CIO: Hadoop Isn’t For Everyone,” Clint and Jeff Donaldson discuss the issues with implementing Hadoop and why a high-performance analytics platform like HP Vertica may be a better solution for Big Data success than Hadoop.  According to Jeff Donaldson, “[Data management] is a hard enough of a business problem and we wanted to reduce the technology risk to near zero.”

The article can be found at the CIO Journal blog.  To read the full article, you will need to be a member of the Wall Street Journal web site.

HP Vertica Analytics Platform ready to grow with Cardlytics

by csmith on • in Customers

Recently, we’ve been spending more time with our customers in order to get a better understanding of how they are using HP Vertica, and why they chose the HP Vertica Analytics Platform as their analytics database of choice.  One such customer, Cardlytics, was generous enough to spend some time with us and talk in length about how their company uses HP Vertica to accelerate their Big Data analytics and improve their ability to target new customers with their transaction-driven marketing programs.

To find out more about how Cardlytics is using HP Vertica to power their Big Data analytics program and increase revenue and customer satisfaction, please take some time to read the recently-published case study, or watch one of the Cardlytics customer videos, using the links below:

UPDATE: We just found out that The Economist has a great article on Cardlytics in they published on October 27th.  You can check it out at:

Cardlytics Powers More Ads with HP Vertica

by csmith on • in big data, Vertica Customers

Cardlytics is the pioneer and leader of the cutting edge field of Transaction-Driven MarketingTM, expected to grow into a multi-billion industry in the US over the next four years (according to the Aite Group). The company’s unique advertising platform enables banks to deliver rich, relevant rewards to its customers based on purchasing history while fully protecting their privacy. Since its founding in 2008, Cardlytics has been a leader of innovation with recent accolades including being named one of the 100 most innovative private companies in the world by Red Herring.

In this short video, Jon Wren, Director of Data Innovation for Cardlytics, discusses how Cardlytics uses HP Vertica to enable better personalization for the ads they serve to online banking customers.  In addition, Jon talks about gaining so much time with HP Vertica that his analysts can finally do what they were hired to do – analyze data – instead of wrangling data.

With HP Vertica, Cardlytics believes they have the power to scale Cardlytics to handle any large banking customers without having to worry about the database.

Introducing Tech Talk

by csmith on • in column store, vertica

Since its beginnings, the Database Column has evolved to include information about the Business Intelligence and Database in

dustriesfrom a number of different perspectives. As such, this blog has attracted a diverse range of readers, including those who want high-level intelligence that helps them make strategic business decisions all the way to the people who are implementing databases and working with business intelligence on a daily basis.

It’s for this last group – the “techies” – that we’re proud to introduce a new feature to the Database Column blog. Called “Tech Talk,” each post will feature in-depth information that is important to those of you who are in the trenches. And for those who don’t need to know how to write a SQL query or aren’t interested in the details of GFI (Gap Filling and Interpolation), we are identifying our Tech Talk posts by categorizing them with the “Tech Talk” category so you know immediately whether the content is appropriate for you.

So watch this space for our first Tech Talk post entitled:

GFI – A Swiss Army Knife for Time Series Analytics

Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll be rolling out Tech Talk posts on a number of different subjects, including event window functions, the query benefits of sorted data, implementing a successful proof of concept trial, and how Vertica offers high availability.

If you have any ideas for a Tech Talk topic, please use the Comments section to let us know. We’re looking forward to exploring a number of topics with you, our readers.

Vertica & Flash: Runaway Performance at a Low Price

by csmith on • in vertica

Yesterday, we announced Vertica’s FlexStore for Flash. We think this is a big deal because of what it means for our customers: a cost-effective and simple way to take advantage of the speed and performance of Flash-based memory. You get the performance of having everything in Flash at a cost that’s comparable to having everything on magnetic disk. This solution is available today on industry standard x86 servers from Cisco, Dell, IBM, HP, and others.

Flash = Speed

Flash-based memory devices deliver significant increases in query and load performance compared to magnetic disks because Flash has higher bandwidth and lower latency. How fast? We’ve benchmarked loads and queries in Flash at 850% the transactions per hour compared to 15K RPM SAS drives.

Vertica’s FlexStore for Flash

FlexStore is the secret sauce that gives Vertica the flexibility to create projections and assign different columns to different kinds of storage to maximize performance. FlexStore is able to place the most commonly used columns on Flash while storing rarely used columns on slower, cheaper magnetic disks. You use only as much Flash as you need to optimize performance. Most Vertica customers are close to the 85/15 rule – 85% of the queries utilize 15% of the columns. Since columns used in predicates are typically sorted, less than 12% of the total compressed data is generally read by a query.

With Vertica’s FlexStore, a relatively small Flash device accelerates terabytes of SAS or SATA drives per node – simply, easily and cost effectively using off-the-shelf hardware. Even complex queries and analytic workloads only require a handful of tightly directed accesses to spinning disk, returning results in milliseconds where competitors take minutes, hours, or simply reject queries due to data volume.

Vertica’s True Column Store Compression Is Key for Flash

The Vertica Analytic Platform was designed and built from the ground up as a true column store to maximize I/O efficiency and minimize legacy disk impact on analytic performance.

Vertica’s FlexStore and true column store compression combined with Flash-based memory delivers optimal price/performance. FlexStore automatically distributes the most commonly used columns into Flash media, SSD’s, etc. while our true column store compression ensures each gigabyte of flash houses significantly more user data than it would in competing databases.

Vertica’s FlexStore Delivers Near-MemoryPerformance

Row store vendors have attempted to emulate true column store architecture by slicing blocks of rows into columns – and they’ve subsequently claimed similar advantages. On the surface, some of these claims appear to have merit, but dig a little and you’ll see that these row-store performance numbers only work on high-bandwidth devices such as main memory DRAM, flash media, or SSD’s. When data must be requested from disk, the entire column-shredded block of rows is fetched – requiring an order of magnitude greater I/O bandwidth. To keep all relevant data in cache, vast amounts of unused data must also be retained. This brute force approach is far from efficient.

Vertica’s FlexStore Provides the Most Efficient Flash Solution

Using Flash for Temporary Space

Vertica FlexStore for Flash allows you to store more than just frequently used columns in Flash media. Administrators leverage main memory as much as possible as they tune and optimize their analytics platforms. They often have to deal with analytical operations, such as large sorts and joins that require temporary space because they won’t fit in main memory. Traditional architectures often run into bottlenecks during these operations because they rely on magnetic disks that have high latency and low throughput.

Vertica FlexStore removes these bottlenecks by assigning temporary data, such as intermediate results, to faster kinds of storage like Flash Media and SSD’s. With FlexStore for Flash, you get significant performance gains on high concurrency workloads with substantial hardware savings over traditional architectures.

Flash Out Performs Disk

There’s more on using Flash-based memory for temporary space in Curt Monash’s post.

Best of Both Worlds: Performance and Flexibility

We’re excited because combining Vertica’s FlexStore and Flash-based memory devices on industry standard x86 hardware, our customers can easily leverage Vertica’s flexible, hybrid analytics platform combining traditional storage media and Flash memory to support their business at a fraction of the cost of traditional architectures. Over time, as the relative cost of flash declines, Vertica customers can easily move more of their data onto it on the fly without taking the database down.

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