The demand for high-tech appliances has been on the rise in the last few years. Their benefits — including high performance, low TCO, rapid time-to-value, and ease of use — have driven adoption in a variety of industries from data warehousing to network and security management, storage, retail, telephony and so on. As the analyst firm, Forrester, noted in a 2008 report:

“Appliances – in all their proliferation – are here to stay and are moving into the mainstream of computing and networking”

It turns out that the database of preference for a growing number of appliance vendors is MySQL. As noted on its appliance page, MySQL’s benefits of low TCO, ease of use, and rapid time-to-value map well to the requirements of appliance offerings.

As appliance markets have matured and competition has increased, there has been a growing need to differentiate. In many cases, appliance vendors are accomplishing this with the addition of analytics that enable customers to generate more value from the data being collected/stored in the appliance. However, due to it’s data warehousing limitations on general-purpose hardware, MySQL presents performance challenges for these appliance vendors. What we are now starting to see is that these vendors are turning to Kickfire to address this challenge.

As an example, one of our first customers is a mid-market ERP vendor with over 30,000 customer locations that delivers its application as an appliance. This company has developed a new analytic offering that gives customers a series of reports and dashboards to analyze their transactional data captured in the ERP application. Using the Kickfire appliance as the platform for their analytic offering, this vendor saw 50X – 100X query performance improvement.

Another early customer, a network performance management appliance vendor that services many of the world’s largest organizations, was seeing its larger customers starting to hit the scalability and performance limits of MySQL. After testing with the Kickfire appliance, this vendor saws it query performance improve by an average of 600X.

Performance aside, there are other features of the Kickfire offering that make it compelling to appliance vendors. Some of these include:

• High analytic user concurrency (100+). Many of these appliance offerings have large numbers of users that need access to the data, not just a select few analysts as in traditional data warehousing
• High volume, near real-time updates. This feature makes Kickfire suitable in operational-type environments, common in those markets where appliances have succeeded
• Extensive SQL performance coverage. With this capability, Kickfire can deliver performance on the broad range of analytic applications found within the appliance world
• The appliance form factor. As an appliance, Kickfire fits well with the vendors’ own delivery mechanism and plug-and-play value proposition

In summary, the Kickfire MySQL appliance fits well with both the delivery model and the analytic requirements of many appliance vendors which is why we believe we are continuing to see strong interest from this market sector.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 at 2:00 am by Karl Van den Bergh and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.