EMC releases Unified Analytics Platform for big data crunching

EMC has enhanced its big data analytics portfolio with the launch of the Unified Analytics Platform (UAP), designed to combine Greenplum and Hadoop analytics technology with new collaboration software.

EMC acquired Greenplum last year and has since been heavily marketing the analytics database while expanding its flagship storage technology to also support big data analytics.

Now EMC has combined its recent extension to the Greenplum products with new social networking software, Chorus, to ensure big data is easily accessible and clearly visible to broader numbers of staff within an organisation.

"UAP is meant to enable enterprises to consume big data analytics solutions in a seamless way and get productivity out of data," said EMC Greenplum European vice president Elie Simons, in an interview with V3.

In September, EMC released the Greenplum Modular Data Computing Appliance (DCA), which combines the massively parallel processing architecture of the Greenplum database with that of Apache Hadoop, the non SQL open-source project database.

This offered customers a straightforward and scalable offering to process large amounts of data, both unstructured and structured, in short time periods.

Now with the UAP, EMC will combine the DCA with its new software, Greenplum Chorus, which acts as a social network for data science teams.

Chorus was launched last year by Greenplum, but had been largely ignored by EMC while it focused on integrating Greenplum with the rest of its portfolio.

According to EMC, Chorus will let analysts search for interesting datasets across all databases they have permission to access, whether it is Greenplum or databases from Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server or Teradata, as well as across disparate datacentres.

Chorus will then allow analysts to select slices of data and put these in their own database sandbox for analysis, said EMC, adding that Chorus will update their copies of data whenever sources are updated.

Analysts can share analysis of the datasets with their colleagues using the Chorus social network tools.

EMC advises customers to integrate the UAP with the Documentum xCP, which allows analysts to closely monitor big data through building case management systems.

EMC last year updated its storage technology to support big data analytics, releasing VPLEX, which allows data to be accessed and shared between distant datacentres, creating a shared pool of data ready for analysis.