Vertica Accelerator – Ease of Use Plus Control

In case you missed it, Vertica recently released Vertica Accelerator, our unified analytics platform delivered as a service. There are two main questions that people ask when hearing about this announcement. The first is: does it have all the same features Vertica has, or is it a scaled-down version in some way? The answer to that one is easy: Vertica Accelerator has all of the over 650 functions, machine learning, high performance, etc. that every other version of Vertica has, but with greater ease of installation, uptime, upgrades, etc. The second question takes a bit more explaining. “How is it different from all the other SaaS databases on the market?”

SaaS analytical databases have been around for quite a while, and, in fact, many Vertica customers chose Vertica as an alternative to those SaaS databases. There were reasons why organizations from a wide variety of industries chose Vertica instead of SaaS. We thought long and hard how to avoid the disadvantages that drove customers from SaaS to us, before deciding how to launch Vertica as a Service.

Disadvantages of other SaaS analytical databases:

1. High and unpredictable costs
2. Black box lack of control
3. Necessity to buy multiple components
4. Inflexibility for future changes

To provide customers with the ease of use of SaaS, without making the same mistakes other vendors had made, we opted for a different model.

So, what did we do differently?

Vertica Accelerator has NO bundled hardware or other infrastructure. Pretty much all of our competitors in this space buy discounted hardware from the cloud vendor, or produce it themselves at a much lower cost, and then mark that up higher, and resell it to the customer as part of the cost of their software service. That means the more hardware their databases use, the more money they make – a big disincentive to have efficient software.

Vertica just sells software.

The vast majority of our customers already have a cloud account (just AWS for now, but support for other clouds is on the roadmap.) If your organization has a cloud account, they have negotiated a low rate with Amazon by committing to use at least a certain amount of infrastructure, and you can put any software you want on that. Vertica lets you retire some of that committed spend. And this means something important: both now and in the future, we strive for our software to be as highly efficient as possible, doing more, faster, with less hardware. Since every bit of storage, and every bit of compute costs money on the cloud, that means we are your best bet for using less cloud infrastructure to do the same job. Do more, while paying for less compute and storage.

We also put you in control of the most key aspects of the database. Do you know your workload is going to go way up on Black Friday or the last week of the quarter? You can schedule extra capacity to be ready and waiting. Got hit by an unexpected workload spike? Vertica will autoscale capacity to give you what you need when you need it – within the limits you set. You control under what conditions your database increases compute capacity, and you control how much capacity can get added. You control how much and when the database autoscales, and Vertica transparency makes sure you know how much capacity you’re using at any time.

No more bill shock. No more sweating in front of a CFO to explain why your department blew the budget.

You’re in control of everything from how powerful your compute instances are for a particular job to how many subclusters are dedicated to that job. If you need more RAM to train a machine learning algorithm, for instance, you don’t have to just pay for more nodes. You can choose nodes with more RAM. If you have a slow query, you don’t have to just pay for more nodes. You can optimize the query.

And if you need machine learning, geospatial analyses, or want to switch from a plain-old decision tree to XGBoost, none of that costs you extra. There’s no nickel and dime, “Oh you want this algorithm, well that’s extra,” “Oh, you want that functionality, well you have to buy that separately.” Forget that. Just buy one thing, Vertica Accelerator, and get ALL the functionality, more functions than any other analytical database on the market. Vertica is Vertica, with all functionalities in one box.

You also get the same functionality in multiple deployment options. If you need to pull your work on-premises because of a change in regulations, Vertica runs on-premises. If you need to work partially on prem and partially in the cloud, Vertica does that just fine. If you need to change where or how you work in the future, Vertica does not lock you into only one deployment option.

So, to sum it up, with Vertica Accelerator:

• You get all the features and performance of Vertica, plus we take care of installation, uptime, upgrades, etc.
• You control scaling – either schedule it, or indicate under what conditions you want it to autoscale, and how far.
• You set guardrails, so your bill isn’t automatically scaled beyond your budget.
• You control the instance types, unlike with many “cloud-only” options.
• You see what you’re paying for: both software and infrastructure.
• You get over 650 functions included – geospatial, time series, event pattern matching, machine learning – with others, you have to pay extra for those or buy a whole other product.

With Vertica Accelerator:

You’re in control.