Yellowbrick Data is today emerging from stealth and announcing the debut of its analytic solution for hybrid cloud, the cornerstone of which is the Yellowbrick Data Warehouse.
The company has also revealed $44 million in Series A investment over the past 4 years by DFJ, GV, Menlo Ventures, Samsung Ventures, and Third Point Ventures.
Yellowbrick was founded in 2014 by Neil Carson (CEO), Jim Dawson (CRO), and Mark Brinicombe (principal architect), and its team has experience in both databases and data warehousing hardware at companies such as Fusion-io, Netezza, Google, Microsoft Server, Intel, Snowflake, IBM, and Informix.
Based on the Yellowbrick architecture for native flash queries, the Yellowbrick Data Warehouse is 30x smaller and up to 140x faster compared to existing solutions.
By replacing the spinning disk with an all-memory architecture, data moves directly from flash memory to the CPU, while a modular design allows customers to scale up to petabytes of data by adding analytic nodes on the fly. Designed specifically for high-level ingest and processing, customers can run mixed workloads, including ad hoc queries, large batch queries, business reports, ETL processes and OBDC inserts simultaneously without delay.
According to Yellowbrick, the data warehousing segment has been in need of a refresh. The company contends that a fragmented ecosystem of solutions based on legacy architectures has hindered efficiency and forced businesses to compromise on how quickly and easily they can derive insights from data.
“The market we are going after is the $22 billion a year data warehousing market, of which $17 billion of that is the traditional data warehouse,” said Carson. Building bulletproof enterprise data warehouses “is really tough,” which is why “you can count on one hand the companies that have succeeded” in doing that such as IBM, Oracle, Teradata, and a few others, noted Carson.
Yellowbrick Data aims to bring simplicity back to analytics and data warehousing. Designed as a turnkey appliance using the latest technologies, the Yellowbrick Data Warehouse is based on the Yellowbrick architecture for native flash queries, unlocking the true speed of flash memory to power analytics in the hybrid cloud.
Looking at the challenges that large companies are dealing with, Carson said many have 2 to 3 decades of traditional ETL in their environments that they have to integrate with, “hideously complex” SQL that has been migrated between multiple platforms over the years, and multiple levels of complex nesting, in addition to the pressure of constant queries and massive concurrency.
According to Carson, the Yellowbrick team realized early on that in order to be taken seriously by Global 2000 customers, it would have to address those problems first, and only then could it be concerned with benchmarking.
SQL speed matters once the other issues are solved, because that affects price/performance and the economics of an offering, but if a vendor can’t deal with the complex mixed workloads and workload management challenges, it won’t get the chance to show what it can achieve, said Carson.
According to Yellowbrick, its data warehouse enables a 97% size reduction, replacing six seven-foot cabinets and multiple independent systems with a single 12-inch, fully integrated appliance which means less hardware to manage and better reliability, and that customers can also save millions in power, cooling and data center costs.
The company says it is also up to 140x faster than other data warehouses, which is important in retail fraud detection, advertising analytics, and ad hoc queries.
The company says the Yellowbrick Data Warehouse architecture supports on-premises, private cloud, co-location, edge computing, and public cloud, and that the small form factor facilitates deployment virtually anywhere.
General availability for the Yellowbrick Data Warehouse opened in September 2017. Early customers include Overstock.com, Symphony RetailAI, and TEOCO Corp.
For more information, go to www.yellowbrickdata.com.