Vertica in Eon Mode FAQ

FAQ

• What is Vertica in Eon Mode?
  Vertica in Eon Mode was designed with a cloud-optimized architecture that improves operational simplicity and better supports variable workloads by scaling cloud infrastructure to meet peak demand when needed, and scaling back when it’s not needed. Vertica in Eon Mode enables this through the separation of compute and storage, which manages dynamic workloads by scaling compute resources independent of shared S3 storage. Vertica in Eon Mode supports both AWS and, with Vertica 10, Google Cloud Platform. To support the growing market demand for hybrid deployment options, Vertica now offers all of the capabilities of cloud-optimized architecture in on-premises environments.  Vertica has partnered with several vendors for on-premises deployment, including Pure Storage, MinIO, and Scality. Vertica in Eon Mode also supports Apache Hadoop communal storage in on-premises environments.
• What are the benefits of Vertica in Eon Mode?

  Customers deploying Vertica in Eon Mode will see the following benefits:

  • “Right Size” Economics – Vertica in Eon Mode allows organizations to tie data platform costs directly to business needs by provisioning just the right amount of compute resources for queries and just the right amount of storage resources for data.
  • Elastic Scalability – Seamlessly scales the S3 capacity and number of nodes independently of each other.
  • Linear Throughput Scaling – You can quickly scale the number of queries that the cluster can handle by simply adding more nodes to meet the requirements for your dynamic workloads.
  • Operational Efficiency – Provides greater operational simplicity and workload isolation to meet SLA and business stakeholder objectives – a win-win for any IT organization. With Vertica in Eon Mode, Vertica cluster performance is predictable with a node down and even during a repair process. Further, the node recovery is efficient, quick, predictable, and more reliable than ever before.
• What are the use cases of Vertica in Eon Mode?

  Here is a sample of use cases that are applicable for data analytics based on separation of compute and storage:

  1. Intelligent Device Early Release Testing – A medical equipment manufacturer is going to market with medical devices embedded with more sensors than ever before. It needs to run a trial at key accounts before formally launching the product. Vertica in Eon Mode provides optimal resources to analyze the trial data, ensuring the device manufacturer maximum reliability upon the generally available mass release.
  2. Experimentation and Discovery for Optimized Device Setting – HVAC manufacturers need to run periodic maintenance tests by pushing an update to edge devices, collecting a large amount of sensor data, and quickly identifying micro patterns before pushing out optimized settings. With Vertica in Eon Mode, HVAC manufacturers increase the compute and storage resources seamlessly to accommodate for increased activity.
  3. Engagement analysis for new product introduction – Gaming Companies must increase analytical capacity during major launches or tournaments to evaluate the success of new games or provide customer insights during big tournaments or special events. With Vertica in Eon Mode, gaming companies derive just-in-time analytics on critical feedback by event – in time to make modifications that appeal to their community – as opposed to the ultimate launch, when it may be too late attract and retain gamers.
  4. Analytics for seasonal sales patterns – Retailers have a variable analytic workload due to high-volume sales seasons or to close the books at the end of the month. They need maximum dashboard performance regardless of the number of concurrent users, so that key members gain access to important metrics. Vertica in Eon Mode ensures maximum dashboard performance regardless of the number of concurrent users, so that key members gain access to important metrics irrespective of the load on the analytics platform and the seasonality.
  5. Project-Based Data Science – Contract data scientists are increasingly used for project-based work, where they ramp up and down analytics projects to meet specific client deliverables and schedules. Vertica in Eon Mode empowers contractors with more flexibility to address client needs faster without the fear of costly overprovisioning.
  6. Data Science and Engineering Team Collaboration – Machine Learning models are often built in the cloud before the model is ultimately deployed onto a much larger, production, on-premises analytics platform. Vertica in Eon Mode provides a “hybrid” bridge that allows data science and data engineering teams to collaborate on a best-of-both world’s approach to Machine Learning model development, testing, and deployment.
• Is Eon Mode a new offering?
  No, Vertica in Eon Mode is not a new offering. It is an optional mode of the Vertica Analytics Platform.
• Do I need a license to run Vertica in Eon Mode, if I am a current user of Vertica with an existing license?
  No, there is no separate license for Vertica in Eon Mode. It is an architectural mode of Vertica so all customers with valid Vertica licenses can create databases running in Eon Mode.
• How do I evaluate Vertica in Eon Mode?
  You can download the Vertica Community Edition from www.vertica.com/try and evaluate Vertica in Eon Mode.
• Where do I learn more about Vertica in Eon Mode?
  Please visit www.vertica.com/clouds for an overview of Vertica in Eon Mode and read a series of blogs at my.vertica.com/blog/category/eon-mode/
• What is Vertica in Enterprise Mode?
  Vertica in Enterprise Mode has been the default mode for number of years when deploying Vertica on a fixed set of compute nodes with direct attached storage. Vertica in Enterprise Mode provides steady and unchanging pace of analytics at your company.
• When do I use Vertica in Eon Mode vs. Vertica in Enterprise Mode?

  Today, Vertica in Enterprise Mode is available for all Vertica deployment options – on-premises, in a VM, on Hadoop, and on your choice of clouds (AWS, Azure, and Google). Vertica in Eon Mode can be deployed on AWS and Google clouds and on-premises on Pure Storage FlashBlade, Hadoop communal storage, and MinIO, bringing all of the advantages of a cloud-optimized architecture to on-premises data centers. If you have a uniform workload with fixed performance expectations for both hot and cold data and have invested in servers with tightly coupled storage, then you should use Vertica in Enterprise Mode. But, if you have a variable workload that requires you to quickly scale up or down the compute or storage resources and are primarily accessing hot data then you should use Vertica in Eon Mode. Please see the matrix for a comparison of Vertica in Enterprise Mode vs. Vertica in Eon Mode:

  	Enterprise Mode	Eon Mode
  On-premises deployment	Yes	Yes (with Vertica in Eon Mode for Pure Storage, Hadoop communal storage, Scality, or MinIO)
  VM deployment	Yes	No
  Google, Azure cloud deployment	Yes	Google only
  AWS cloud deployment	Yes	Yes
  Operational Characteristics
  Workload suitability	Fixed (fixed – consistent number of nodes)	Dynamic (seasonal, hour to hour, etc.)
  Workload isolation SLA objectives	No	Yes
  Grow data indefinitely while paying only for compute	Yes (with per-node licensing)	Yes (with per-node licensing)
  Storage type	Local Attached Disk (Raid 8 for durability and performance)	Shared S3 Object Store – Durability (Ephemeral Depot disks for performance)
  Hibernate all compute nodes	No	Yes
  Disaster Recovery – cluster replication	Backup/Recovery	S3 Snapshots
  Features
  Advanced Analytics	Yes	Yes
  Machine Learning	Yes	Yes
  External Data	Yes	Yes
  Community Edition | BYOL | AWS Marketplace Hourly Pricing	Yes	Yes

• Can I leverage investment in Hadoop or S3 data lakes with Vertica in Eon Mode?
  Yes, Vertica in Eon Mode allows you to query data in Hadoop or S3 data lakes using Vertica External Tables, without having to copy the data into a Vertica database. This allows enterprises to extend Vertica’s analytical capabilities to their existing data lake investments. With Vertica 10, Vertica in Eon Mode also supports Hadoop communal storage.
• What deployment platforms are supported for Vertica in Eon Mode?
  Today, Vertica in Eon Mode is supported for AWS and Google cloud environments. Users can implement on-premises deployments of Vertica in Eon Mode when using it with Pure Storage FlashBlade, Hadoop communal storage, Scality Ring, or MinIO. Please contact us for a roadmap on additional deployment options of Vertica in Eon Mode
• Does Vertica in Eon Mode support Machine Learning model development and deployment?

  Yes, customers deploying Vertica in Eon Mode can leverage built-in advanced analytics and machine learning models for deriving greater insights into their data sets. All the Machine Learning algorithms and functions from linear regression, logistical regression, K-Means, Random Forest, Naive Bayes, to SVM are all supported with Vertica in Eon Mode. In fact, customers can leverage the end-to-end Machine Learning Management process – from data prep to deployment:

  • Prepare data with functions for normalization, outlier detection, sampling, imbalanced data processing, missing value imputation, and more
  • Create, train, and test advanced Machine Learning models on massive data sets
  • Evaluate model-level statistics including ROC tables and confusion matrices
  • Revert back to previous model iterations using model management and version control features
• What are the operational differences between Vertica in Eon Mode and Vertica in Enterprise Mode?

  Vertica in Eon Mode separates the compute from the storage and that lends to a number of operational benefits:

  • Vertica setup is easier because of S3 durability. There is no need to set up RAID for your local storage, which can be time consuming and expensive.
  • Node loss and recovery is easier and faster because of the shard subscription model in Vertica in Eon Mode.
  • There is no longer a need for a redundant node as nodes can be easily added and removed.
  • Vertica in Eon Mode also provides the flexibility to un-provision or pause the Vertica database by shutting down all the compute nodes in the cluster.
• How does Vertica in Eon Mode’s storing/querying data on S3 compare to External Tables on S3?
  Vertica in Eon Mode stores all its data in S3 in ROS format. Further, Vertica in Eon Mode also allows users to query and perform JOINS with data in External Tables on S3 and/or Hadoop data lakes. ROS format is inherently more performant than any of the External Table formats because of optimizations in storing and managing the catalog. Vertica ROS is at least 4x more performant than Parquet or ORC, which are alternative columnar formats for storing data in S3 and Hadoop. So, even when the data required is not in the local disk-based cache of Vertica in Eon Mode, a query fetch to S3 is required, which is still 4x faster than the same query on external Parquet data on S3.
• How does Vertica in Eon Mode fit into the greater open source analytics ecosystem?
  Many enterprise organizations have built big data pipelines with open source solutions. Vertica’s approach has been not only to integrate with these solutions but also to contribute back to the open source community. In fact, Vertica in Eon Mode works very well with open source offerings such as Apache Hadoop, Spark, and Kafka. Vertica’s connectors for Hadoop, Spark, and Kafka are fully compatible with Vertica database running in Eon Mode. You can move data between Vertica and these open source solutions seamlessly for building an efficient data pipeline and greater insights into the data.