Amazon Redshift Too Slow or Crashing? BlazingDB Performs
Over the past several weeks, I have been rolling out a series of Spotlights on the Lontra Ventures portfolio. BlazingDB is the third in this series, after RackN and Appbase. By now, a few trends are emerging. All of the founding teams are very highly technical and incredibly well-educated with passion and emotional intelligence needed to excel in the hyper fast start-up world. These teams move boldly with strong convictions and keep their eyes and ears open. The opportunities are exponential, and the path to success is often non-linear.
As mentioned in previously Spotlights, my goals are:
Working with and investing in stellar teams delivering true vision with compelling products to paying customers for MEANINGFUL results.
Insights Are Key While Data Is the New Gold
We have all heard the cliche: “Data is the new gold.” It true that more data has been created in the past two years than all of history combined.
This massive data creation and the potential for new data insights has driven explosive demands for systems that perform at both scale and speed. Boom! Heterogeneous architectures apply exciting advances in technologies such as GPUs (graphics cards originally invented for gaming and video), solid state memory, high network bandwidth and many other cloud components to break barriers and deliver meaningful progress. The Data Warehouse market is typically estimated at $30 B in annual revenue and the big data components, where the largest need for performance gains resides, is growing at double digit rates. According to 451 Research, “For vendors with less than $1 B in revenue, we estimate a CAGR of 39%.”
Massive Scale with Unprecedented Speed
BlazingDB offers a massively distributed, “cloud first”, high performance SQL database that achieves performance gains on the largest workloads and datasets at extraordinarily competitive costs. These are multi-Terabyte data loads, crunched by the Fortune 100. The system BlazingDB offers is distributed so as to take advantage of a GPU-cluster’s strength, which processes data in parallel to enable simultaneous processing. The alternative would be serial processing to which we are accustomed in more traditional architectures. BlazingDB also runs “on disk” as opposed to “in memory” which benefits organizations with massive datasets where “in memory” is not a cost feasible solution.
Easily Available In the Cloud on Amazon Web Services
Announced just today, BlazingDB is available in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace creating a seamless launch and go. For those new to the AWS Marketplace, with one click, a fully-configured BlazingDB GPU server can be activated in the Cloud.
BlazingDB’s customers-to-date came knocking after experiencing failure with leading Data Warehouses such as Amazon’s Redshift and others. Upon testing their current cluster against BlazingDB, customers see between 2.5x — 20x performance improvements.
Rich Data Discovery Enhances Society
The BlazingDB team is passionate about its ability to conduct and promote large scale analytics. Deep-rooted within the company’s DNA is the idea that access to and ability to transform information is a fundamentally important pillar of society. The founders are committed to the global distributed computing community and engage fully by offering and sustaining a free community version for life. BlazingDB takes the concept of community further by creating an extremely diverse and inclusive work environment and has taken the 1% pledge.
Customers Experience Scalability, Performance Leaps and Cost Reductions
As mentioned, developers are free to begin working with the single GPU community version. Advanced analytic companies such as OneModel, have full deployments and are experiencing scalability, performance leaps and cost reductions. Some of the largest global financial institutions are evaluating BlazingDB given that current market offerings simply cannot address the demands of large scale database processing. Transformations, aggregations and joins at massive scale is where BlazingDB wins!
Our Team is Stellar
BlazingDB was founded out of necessity. Three years ago brothers Rodrigo Aramburu (CEO) and Felipe (CTO), from Houston were working on a consulting project for the Peruvian government involving 14 legacy systems. When the market could not a deliver product to meet their needs, Felipe was left with only one option, build it himself. He created the first GPU table joiner and the rest is history. The brothers are a perfect blend of the creativity and passion that startups require coupled with the discipline and structure of Deloitte Consulting. William Malpica, a brilliant University of Texas friend, joined shortly thereafter to lead the engineering roadmap and delivers a level of focus and process essential for delivering on time. The team maintains a development office in Lima, Peru which brings incredible talent and energy.
2017 is the Year of Benchmarks & Customer Traction
BlazingDB has blazed aggressively into 2017. Soon, they will release a series of benchmark studies validating the multiple performance gains in various scenarios. Enterprise customer demands are shaping the product roadmap with enhanced features from security to fault-tolerance and recovery. The team also understands that customers favor multiple deployment options and will soon deploy in additional marketplaces such as Microsoft Azure.
Supported Globally by Investors and Advisors
BlazingDB is a model for global startups. They were accelerated and invested in by Techstars Boulder in 2015. Significant capital has been raised in Peru and throughout Latin America. I am a proud investor and advisor.
Let the Game Play On
BlazingDB has accomplished so much yet there is much more to come. In addition to rolling out enterprise benchmarks, new features and delivering value to customers, the team is growing rapidly from engineering to business development. The pace of change in this market is astonishingly rapid and exciting, hence the need to keep eyes wide open as opportunities emerge quickly.
Lontra Ventures Background
Lontra Ventures works with companies ranging from artificial intelligence, analytics, audio and video, big data, database technologies, developer tools, high performance computing, IT infrastructure, IoT and web optimization. Delivery delivery models span from API, SaaS, PaaS and Enterprise Sales and even consumer.
