Vertica was designed from the very first line of code to be a software-only data warehouse with complete freedom from underlying infrastructure, giving you the choice to decide what hardware to use and where.
This commitment to flexibility is evident in our product history, as we took the same core MPP analytics engine from commodity hardware on-premise, to Apache Hadoop, and to the clouds. The introduction of Eon Mode with AWS expands this flexibility even further, allowing you to separate compute and storage so you can scale these resources up and down independently.
But this isn’t the only level of flexibility organizations are looking for in a modern data warehouse. How you use and pay for it matter too. Some organizations want a majority of their expenses to be operational. Some prefer a traditional license while others are moving toward subscription-based pricing. These decisions all depend on the specific considerations of your organization.
As more organizations are moving their data and analytical workloads to the cloud for greater elasticity and operational simplicity, Vertica on AWS has evolved to deliver cloud flexibility with multiple deployment modes and pricing options. If you’re looking to deploy Vertica on AWS, there are important options you should consider, starting with which deployment mode (read architecture) makes the most sense.
Choose your mode
Vertica offers two deployment modes for getting analytics up and running on AWS. Both modes leverage the same core analytics engine for incredible performance at massive scale.
Enterprise Mode: Enterprise Mode provides tightly coupled compute and storage resources for customers with a uniform workload and fixed performance expectations. This architecture is similar to what you might expect with an on-premise Vertica deployment.
Eon Mode: Eon Mode on the other hand is a cloud-optimized architecture so you can easily scale resources up and down, isolate workloads and optimize infrastructure costs. This is achieved by separating compute and storage resources, leveraging the efficiency of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) while configuring the right EC2 compute power to meet dynamic workload requirements from month to month, day to day, or hour to hour.
Whichever mode makes sense for you, it’s important to point out that these two modes do NOT require different pricing or licenses. Either deployment mode can be accessed from Vertica when running on AWS.
Choose your license
How you purchase Vertica on AWS is flexible as well, with different pricing and licensing options to fit the specific needs of your business or use case. Bring your Vertica license to AWS, purchase Vertica by the hour directly from AWS Marketplace, or use external tables to analyze ORC or Parquet data stored in S3:
Bring your Own License: Vertica is available as a Bring Your Own License (BYOL) model on Amazon Web Services. Vertica’s BYOL model is available as either perpetual or subscription-based terms, and can be transferred from across clouds, on-premise, or used in a hybrid deployment. Vertica’s perpetual and subscription-based licenses are available on a per-terabyte or per-node basis.
Pay by the Hour: Vertica can also be purchased with usage-based, per-node/hour pricing directly in AWS Marketplace. This pay-as-you-go model includes support and lets you get started in minutes with no long-term license requirement. Vertica by the Hour provides much needed flexibility for organizations wanting to start small and scale as their cloud analytics workloads change.
External Data Add-on: Want to analyze your data lake at an economically favorable price? The Vertica External Data add-on lets you analyze all of your data in Parquet or ORC formats stored in Amazon S3, using external tables. The External Data add-on gives you the ability to explore all of your data, create JOINs between your Vertica data warehouse and data stored in S3, and leverage built-in machine learning capabilities to train models on massive S3 data lakes.
Vertica Customers on AWS
Read these case studies to see how other organizations are leveraging Vertica on AWS for cutting edge analytics:
Climate Corporation: Vertica supports highly sustainable and innovative farming with seamless integration and analysis of data-driven decision making.
hMetrix: Dispensing a strong dose of analytics for population management, hMetrix helps improve healthcare decisions and outcomes with Vertica in the cloud
About the Author
Ben Smith
Senior Product Marketing Manager
Ben is a Senior Product Marketing Manager with Vertica, where he supports content development, product messaging, go-to-market planning and digital campaigns. Ben is a Vertica product evangelist who believes data can play a transformative role powering business and process innovation across every industry. Prior to Vertica, Ben worked in Product Marketing for an IoT analytics software provider focused on energy data management. He has an MBA from Boston University and currently lives in Washington, DC.
