SGI Planning In-Memory Appliance For HANA Analytics

SGI, slogging through some tough times due to cutbacks in high-performance computing contracts by the US government, is now focusing on other facets of the big data analytics business.

The company revealed plans on 14 January to develop an in-memory database appliance to run longtime business partner SAP’s fast-rising HANA analytics software.

In-memory processing

Back in October at its quarterly earnings call, SAP reported that HANA, the creation of SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner and launched in late 2010, brought $204 million (£128m) to the revenue line in the third quarter, up from $134 million in the second quarter, for year-to-year growth of 79 percent — which is impressive sales traction.

HANA DB takes advantage of the low cost of main memory (RAM), data processing abilities of multi-core processors and the fast data access of solid-state drives relative to traditional hard drives to deliver better performance of analytical and transactional applications.

Using the scalable shared memory architecture of SGI’s next-generation UV system together with HANA, the new in-memory appliance from SGI will be designed to streamline database management for single large-node environments, which require extremely high capacity and scale to meet the needs of in-memory databases.

The new SGI computing system is expected to help enable businesses and government agencies running high volume databases and multitenant environments to utilise high-performance DRAM that can offer up to 200 times the performance of flash memory to help deliver faster insight.

Single-node scalability

In addition, SGI’s shared memory technology will enable unprecedented scale in a single node, helping to enable customers to reduce the cost of management by up to 50 percent compared with multi-node solutions.

“Many companies are running database sizes and multi-tenant environments that require exceptional scale-up capacity capabilities, where SGI leads with its expertise and technology,” SGI President and chief executive Jorge Titinger said.

“By working with SAP, a trusted provider to the enterprise and one of the innovative leaders in in-memory technology, SGI will now be able to target a significant high-end user requirement, representing an exciting market opportunity for us.”

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Originally published on eWeek.