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Versant and Kove recently announced their strategic partnership and stated that moving forward will benefit both companies as well as their customers.
We held a phone interview with Robert Greene, the Vice President of Technology at Versant, and Jim Hetherington, Director of Business Development at Kove, to flesh out some of the advantages of this new strategic partnership.
IDC predicts that in 2011, 1.8 Zetabyes of data will be created and replicated. To put this in perspective, five Exabytes is all of the words ever spoken in the history of mankind. A mind blowing number, a Zetabyte is composed of 10(21) , while a Exabyte is only (10)18. We are discussing amounts of data that by all rights are exploding exponentially in the last few years and the trend is only multiplying by orders of magnitude each and every year.
To manage and organize this information in an easy and accessible format is extremely important, and that is exactly where this partnership comes into play. When managed correctly, this amount of data presents enormous opportunities to gain critical, actionable insight, not to mention data mining implications in the future.
Thats precisely why Versant Corporation, an industry leader in specialized data management software, is announcing a partnership with Kove, a pioneering leader in high performance storage. The two companies will combine Versants Object Database, known for its superior data ingestion performance for complex information models, with the Kove XPD2 Storage System to produce the fastest available enterprise level storage system for extremely large and complex data volumes.
The object based database that Versant has pioneered is critical for the management of the data and the Kove XPD2 is a storage accelerator that can enable heretofore unseen amounts of data acceleration.
The XPD2 delivers greater than 28.5 GB/sec bandwidth of random or sequential I/O, the highest continuous, sustainable performance in a 4U enclosure available.
The device delivers sustained a usable 11.7 million IOPS, a world record. These numbers are not burst numbers, nor do they change according to storage occupancy fluctuations. Shortest path response time is 6 us read and 8us write, a world record and the fastest in the industry.
The implications of the speed of the Versant database and the agility of the Kove storage device, when combined, should yield a perfect fusion of the two technologies.
A quick look at the published Benchmark Results of this combination, and then onto the release.
Medium Transaction Test
For our small transaction, each creator creates 4 trees with a height of 5, fan-out of 9, and node size of 1000. Each tree contains approximately 66K nodes for a transaction size of 6.6 MBs and a total of 266 MBs for creating the 4 trees.
Interpretation of Results
The Kove system not only provides superior performance, but superior scalability as well. With a single process, the Kove system out performs the RAID system by almost 2X. But as we add processes the RAID performance flattens out while the Kove system provides increased throughput as we increase the number of processes. These results also highlight the superior scalability of the Versant Object Database.
Large Transaction Test
Our large transaction test, each creator creates one tree with a height of 5, fan-out of 12, and node size of 100. The resulting tree contains approximately 271K nodes for a transaction and total size of 27 MB.
Interpretation of Results
For larger transactions, the Kove system once again provides superior performance but the scalability advantage is even more prominent. The RAID system throughput is completely flat as we add processes while the Kove system continues to provide linear throughput as we add more processes connected to the same database.
For system administrators for extremely large datasets that span the continent, the challenge is to bring the right management solutions, and also the right type of storage acceleration devices, into one solution that will maximize performance and minimize latency. It is here that the Versant and Kove collaboration and strategic partnership will thrive.