Indexima improves Snowflake user experience

Indexima, launched in 2016 to boost BI, joined The IT Press Tour this week that took place in Valletta, Malta. It was the right time to meet one of the founder, Nicolas Korchia, CEO, to learn more about the company and the product.

The idea came from a real performance problem discovered at Mappy, the french geo positioning service, around 2015. The realtime navigation implies some real latency each time a change is requested on the screen. And then the user experience became a nightmare. In 2017, the team raised €1.3M and the project took roots in Hadoop to address performance challenges. In 2020, more DBs have been added and a SaaS mode. It triggered some real adoption and in 2020 the company reached 15 customers. Then the Covid happened and hurt many companies of all flavors. This key moment served as a pivot time for Indexima and realized that the fast growing Snowflake cloud data warehouse represented the right environment to accelerate. During these years Hadoop has lost its footprint with many users adopting new solutions open source or commercial ones. This new wave was named Indexima 2.0, today for Snowflake and soon with Databricks.

The company has developed a real expertise on SQL queries optimization especially on complex ones wishing to solve this challenge to offer an easy user experience via simple interactive graphical dashboard or interfaces. The key idea in Indexima approach relies on the Pre Aggregation model with keys and aggregates.

In the past all data and Indexima were deployed on-premises and leverage some data copy with some risk of data divergence. With the v2, things are done in-place and for Snowflake it means within the CDW workplace so everything is available for all users. As soon as Indexima engine is deployed, it starts to collect SQL queries continuously, understand request model leveraging ML and AI and learn schema. Based on that it made its own optimization collecting information, creating special dynamic aggregation tables... and a 20s average delay is reduced to less than 1 second on the NYC citibike demo we saw.

The value is immediate as there is no need to develop anything just point to the new Indexima URL instead of the Snowflake one, cost is reduced as Snowflake instance can be smaller and performance is boosted with ratio such as 100:1.

The window of opportunity for Indexima appears to be significant with some real key paths to penetrate the market with data warehouse players and aggregations players. The team is looking for new partners to accelerate on this market aspect. The next effort will target Databricks so we anticipate some good days for the Indexima team.

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Manticore Search for an universal search engine

Manticore Search, an open source high performance search engine project, joined The IT Press Tour this week to introduce their approach to this common challenge for a few decades now. Sergey Nikolaev, CEO and co-founder, took time to introduce the idea and gave us lots of details.

Everything started with the Sphinx project early 2000 but it stopped in 2016-17, so a new direction was clearly needed to leverage all the work done but also consider new challenges and needs with better performance, new technologies underneath, still in open source.

The firm was founded by Sergey Nikolaev, Peter Zaitsev, former CEO of Percona, and Mindaugas Zukas, COO of Altinity, leading a team of 10+ key developers.

The mission is to deliver a very simple scalable search engine, in open source mode, operating on affordable standard hardware. The team targets general search and log analytics with a real motivation to boost queries speed, resource consumption and SQL and JSON support. Beyond full-text search, it also adds faceted, Boolean, Fuzzy, Geo and Vector search, so very comprehensive model.

The demos we saw have been pretty impressive and fully transparent. The product is really very confidential but secured pretty names like Craigslist, Rozetka, Socialgist, Statista, Europrcs, Hotelplan, PubChem or Huispedia.

Several other products exist on the market like Elasticsearch, the table below explains a bit some differences:

They plan to add auto-sharding, authentication, integration with Kibana and auto-embeddings for vector search and consider some enhancements with AI.

The full source code is available on GitHub via this link.

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EasyVirt surfs on data center energy optimization needs

EasyVirt, a french IT software vendor founded in 2011, joined The IT Press Tour this week in Valletta, Malta, and it was the perfect opportunity to learn more about their solutions.

We spent some time to illustrate electricity and energy consumption and it becomes even more critical with the fast growing AI usage. At the same time Europe continues to promote new regulations probably to let China and Indian overtake Europe... and for that Europe is really a champion.

The company develops 3 solutions - DC Scope, DC NetScope and CO2 Scope - with a small highly skilled team and generates around €1 million in 2024. They're recognized for their expertise in IT infrastructure virtualization, FinOps and CloudOps and Green IT, confirmed by 100+ cross industries customers with names like Safran, Fleury Michon, La Poste, Pole Emploi, CNES, MAIF or Amundi among others.

They approach their prospects having strong desire to understand the green impact of their digital services but clearly they don't know where to start. But it appears that it is very difficult to build such solution due to the collection of energy measurement challenge and the choice of the right algorithms with the necessity to not alter current services. 

DC Scope targets virtualized environments deployed on-premises or in the cloud and of course in a hybrid model. DC NetScope is dedicated to the network traffic analysis and CO2 Scope's mission is around IT Carbon measurement. These solutions are stressed and used by their clients and improvements are included regularly based on end-users feedbacks. The various cases studies have generated a reduction in vCPU or RAMs, deletion of VMs, hypervisor deletions, resizing of production environments or other gains. The philosophy is agent-less and no SaaS model is available, everything is local and secure for better control. Until now VMware has represented the hypervisor of choice for the team and they plan to add Proxmox, Nutanix AVH, Kubernetes with Red Hat OpenShift and VMware Tanzu but also GPU as it is a significant energy burner. Later they think about adding XCP-ng.

EasyVirt sells its solutions via a network of partners such as resellers, integrators, MSPs or even consulting firms like Capgemini, or CGI but even Dell. A 30 days trial is available promoting a try and buy model. The pricing is based on perpetual model also a subscription one on-demand. We'll see where EasyVirt is going but clearly their approach fits current end-users needs, no doubt.

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The IT Press Tour #59 will land soon in Malta

The 59th IT Press Tour will take place in Valletta, Malta, in a few days.

Topics will be about IT infrastructure, cloud, networking, security, data management, big data, analytics and storage and of course AI as it is everywhere. We'll meet 6 innovative companies, among them:

• DigiFilm Corporation, a emerging player in long term data preservation,
• EasyVirt, a specialist in the efficiency of physical and virtual servers,
• Indexima, a reference in fast BI and Analytics,
• Manticore Search, key actor for information search,
• ProxySQL, the fast enabler for MySQL and PostgreSQL,
• and Scalytics, the fast growing company in AI federation.

I invite you to follow us on Twitter with #ITPT and @ITPressTour, my twitter handle and @CDP_FST and journalists' respective handle.

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Arcitecta and Wasabi join forces

Arcitecta, a leader in unstructured data management, and Wasabi Technologies, the reference in alternative cloud storage, just announced a partnership. Mediaflux, the Arcitecta product, supports the S3 API so it's not a surprise that Wasabi is supported as a new member of the storage realm. It provides cloud storage, often remote, accessible transparently from any client that is connected to the global namespace enabled by Mediaflux. 

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Congruity360 unveils Classify360 3.1

Identified as a key player in unstructured data management, Congruity360, just announced a new iteration of its data classification platform, Classify360. Well detailed during the recent IT Press Tour in Boston, Mark Ward, COO, pre-announced this last release with new features for Insights, Actions and Comply modules to sustain and simplify data management at scale. Among them:

• Data Normalization for AI fueled by precise classification,
• Scan performance improvement and insights for Dell PowerScale, NetApp, Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint on-premises plus enhancement for redundant, obsolete and trivial data, DSPM and AI governance,
• New supported data sources with Nasuni, Wasabi, DāSTOR Object, VAST Data, and Oracle Cloud,
• and updates of prepackaged risk models to support HITRUST and NYDFS plus "bring-your-own data dictionary".

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Hydrolix adds Kibana dashboards thanks to Quesma

Hydrolix, a fast growing player in the streaming data lake landscape, has signed a partnership with Quesma, a polish software company, who develops a translation layers for database services. This middleware operates as a database gateway to store data within Hydrolix and maintain Kibana and Logstash/Beats and therefore reduce costs. In other words, Hydrolix can replace Elastic, can ingest data from Logstash and Beats and works with Elastic Common Schema. In the same way, OpenSearch users are able to leverage Hydrolix and then connect to OpenSearch Dashboards. 

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Swissbit targets high-end SSDs

Known by its wide product line, Swissbit, the European leader in Flash media and SSD, has accelerated its strategy for enterprises and data centers market segments. In 2021, the company has acquired the German company Hyperstone, a SATA controller player for SSDs, to confirm its move. But SATA is definitely not enough for this demanding area with PCIe 4, 5 and soon 6 and NVMe. NVMe was a big change for storage infrastructure also with its network companion. It helps to fill the gap between the access performance need and the capability provided by internal devices. For our readers, it's worth mentioning that NVMe provides a series of a significant improvements with number of 64k queues and 64k commands per queue which is a big gap with SATA with a single queue and 32 commands and SAS still with a single queue and 256 commands. Coupled with PCIe, the performance delivered its massive with examples like 14,000 MB/s for sequential read, 10,000MB/s for sequential write, 3,200K IOPS in random read from a FADU SSD example.

More recently with the AI pressure but also its opportunity, the firm has chosen to partner with Burlywood Technology, a Colorado-based specialist, founded in 2015 with a minimum of $20 million raised, to enter the enterprise and data center SSD segment. It was announced in September 2022. Since that, it appears that Burlywood disappeared and it seems that Swissbit silently absorbed Burlywood. In fact, Swissbit acquired the asset and some of employees joined the German band like Tod Earhart, the founder, original CEO and later CTO of Burlywood. The company has been shutdown after this move and obviously the web site is not longer accessible.

We expect NVMe SSD for data center and enterprises in the next few quarters, in 2025.

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Hydrolix shakes the data lake landscape

Hydrolix, a fast growing data lake vendor, joined for the first time The IT Press Tour this week in Boston. The company was founded in 2018 by Marty Kagan, CEO, and Hasan Alayli, CTO, and raised so far $65 million with 4 VC rounds. They both worked in the past at Cedexis, later acquired by Citrix.

The company develops an observability platform able to process real-time logs leveraging S3 storage coupled with independent ingest and query service layers. It includes real-time ETL, combination of multiple sources into 1 single table and SQL and Spark to ingest. The solution can store PBs of data with a very efficient compression techniques with 20:1 and even 50:1 ratios.

The architecture shown below shows the scalability of each element independently of others.

Orchestrated by Kubernetes, it is deployable on-premises but also in the cloud with Azure AKS, AWS EKS, Google GKE and also Akamai LKE following their Linode acquisition. Data connectors accepted so far are Splunk, Spark and Kibana.

In terms of use cases, the solution is positioned for platform and network observability, compliance, SIEM, multi-CDN observability and traffic steering, real user monitoring or ML/AI for anomaly detection...

At Paramount for instance, the numbers are impressive illustrating pretty well the scalability of the Hydrolix platform. The Peak ingestion rate if 10.8million rows/sec for a total of 53 billion records collected and 41TiB compressed into 5.76TiB. At peak, across all clients, it delivers 20 million rows/sec for 100 billion log lines.

The product is often compared with Snowflake and Big Query, here is below the comparison against the first one.

We anticipate an acceleration fo the business in the coming quarters as the trajectory is already impressive...

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Congruity360, a very comprehensive file management solution

Congruity360, an established data management player, joined the 58th edition of The IT Press Tour this week in Boston. We spoke with Mark Ward, COO, about enterprises' pains and how the company solves and addresses these challenges.

Founded in 2016 close to Boston, MA, the firm has raised so far $25 million in 2 rounds. They also acquired 2 companies Seven10 Software and NextGen Storage respectively in 2020 and 2017. Seven10 was absorbed to improve the data migration services offering with StorFirst, a well recognized virtual file system, on top of file servers, object storage instances and CAS solutions. In 2022, Park Place Technologies has purchased the StorFirst software platform from Congruity360.

The product Classify360 targets unstructured data and groups several key functions enterprises must adopt like storage optimization, cloud migration, data protection, DSPM for Data Security Posture Management, AI enablement and GRC for Governance, Risk & Compliance. They compete against several point solutions but also a few integrated ones and the market is rich in this domain as the pain exists for a few decades, being even more critical with a fast growing unstructured data volume for the last 2 decades.

It works with 3 simple efficient steps. The 1st obvious step is based on the knowledge of the environment with files, folders and content analysis, then a classification phase leveraging supervised machine learning followed by some actions fueled by a series of policies to delete, tag, move, secure, deduplicate, encrypt, alert or other custom operations.

The product works with several data sources like file servers supporting NFS and SMB but also object storage with S3 and collaboration solutions such as Office365, Google Workspace, Microsoft Exchange, OneDrive & Azure, Box, Slack, NetApp, Dell EMC...

The company plans to announce product iterations to extend data governance based on AI and DSPM. We'll learn more about this very soon now.

In terms of business model, Congruity360 sells only via channel partners.

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