HP upgrades Vertica analytics platform to keep up with EMC, IBM and Oracle

HP has released the fifth version of the Vertica data analytics software platform, and has confirmed that an integrated hardware platform to support it would be out shortly.

Vertica 5.0 is the first upgrade since HP bought the firm in February and has been designed to allow much faster scaling up and down of computing power, using a mix of cloud, virtual and physical resources. Advanced native SQL analytic functions have been added and the platform is now capable of analysing more than a petabyte of data from customers.

Earlier this month HP showed off its Vertica Analytics System appliance, which the company said will provide the hardware capabilities to allow enterprises to run their own data analysis feeds in real time.

"It's fair to say that HP is a little late to the massive data analytics party," Charles King, principal analyst for research firm Pund-IT, told V3.co.uk.

"Vertica was an acquisition HP needed to make, to let customers know it was competitive in this market. This announcement, and HP's recent actions, are clearly a sign it wants to stay competitive in this space."

He pointed out that EMC has been moving forward very aggressively with developing its offering, since acquiring Greenplum last year, and Intel's Pat Gelsinger and others are committed to mastering the massive parallel analytics sector and integrating it with VMware.

Meanwhile, IBM's Netezza system, together with its Big Data plan, represent a more complete offering than anything HP can offer at the moment, he said. Oracle, formerly close to HP, is also pushing ahead in the field.

For the first time HP is including a software development kit (SDK) for Vertica, so that customers can develop their own code and adapt some existing applications.

"Our new SDK empowers users, developers and partners to create custom analytics that can be called via a standard SQL query, taking full advantage of the performance and scalability of the Massively Parallel Processing columnar Vertica Analytics Platform," said Shilpa Lawande, vice president of engineering at Vertica.