Big Data for Finance

MPPs in Play: Actian Grabs ParAccel; EMC Launches Pivotal

The world of massively parallel processing (MPP) databases just got more interesting with Actian's acquisition of ParAccel, and the formal launch of EMC's Pivotal offspring, which draws heavily on the capabilities of the company's Greenplum unit and its MPP database.

MemSQL Ships Distributed In-Memory Database

Following up on its unveiling in June of last year, San Francisco-based MemSQL has released a distributed version of its eponymous in-memory database, aimed at introducing big data scalability to the low latency performance provided by the initial release.

Big Data Bytes: Intel/LSI, 10Gen, MarkLogic, Actian

The latest from the big data world for the financial tech world ...

* Intel is partnering with storage specialist LSI to integrate the latter's Nytro PCIe flash memory technology into its RAID cache controllers. Among other applications, the combination is a boost for Hadoop. Tests show a 500 GB TeraSort taking 73 minutes with the LSI technology, versus 101 minutes without it.

* 10Gen - developer of the MongoDB NoSQL database - has appointed Sydney Carey as its CFO. She previously had that role at messaging and big data vendor Tibco Software. The move highlights the investment focus being directed at emerging big data companies.

* Fellow NoSQL technology specialist MarkLogic has raised $25 million in its latest financing round, bringing the total raised to $71.2 million. The latest funding was led by Sequoia Capital and Tenaya Capital, with participation from Northgate Capital. MarkLogic CEO Gary Bloom also made a personal investment in this financing round.

* Actian has completed its acquisition of Pervasive Software. Pervasive markets data integration and analysis tools, including its parallel processing DataRush platform.

Q&A: GigaSpaces' Adi Paz on In-Memory Performance and Big Data

The In-Memory term is increasingly in use, and in the context of big data. We asked Adi Paz, vice president of marketing and business development at GigaSpaces Technologies, to explain the integration of in-memory and big data technologies, and what benefits can be expected.

Q: Let's begin with some GigaSpaces and XAP basics. Can you briefly describe what the company does, and what XAP is?

A: GigaSpaces is the pioneer of a new generation of in-memory computing platforms and a leading provider of big data solutions and cloud enabling technologies for mission-critical applications. The GigaSpaces solutions are designed from the ground up to run on any cloud environment, and offer a pain-free, evolutionary path to meet tomorrow’s IT challenges to enterprises in such industries as financial services, e-commerce, transportation/logistics, and telecom carriers.

Big Data Bytes: Kove/McObject Benchmark Risk, Actian Connects to Hadoop, 1010Data Stats

While we wait for solid news from EMC and VMware on their Pivotal Initiative ... here is some big data news nuggets for the world of financial tech ...

* Kove and McObject have teamed with capital markets consultancy Fultech to run a risk management benchmark on their joint offering. Running McObject's eXtremeDB against Kove's RAM appliance, the benchmark processed some 65 terabytes of data per hour, performing Value-at-Risk calculations on 50,000 customer accounts.

* Actian has released version 3.0 of its Vectorwise analytics platform, adding in connectivity to Hadoop, allowing complex analytics to be run on that data.  In tests, more than three terabytes of data was ingested per hour, on a commodity x86 server.

* 1010Data - a hosted big data service - added more than 80 customers in 2012.  It now hosts more than 11.5 trillion rows of data in more than 650,000 tables.  The company's service is based on technology from Kx Systems.

DDN Touts STAC Benchmark Performance

Storage vendor DataDirect Networks is pointing to new record benchmark results for financial analytics for its SFA12K-40 platform. The benchmark in question in the STAC-M3 suite, covering a number of operations on a time series of data.  DDN says its hybrid spinning disk and flash memory platform outperformed "traditional storage" by a factor of eight, and was nearly twice the performance of other flash storage.

MapR Sets New MinuteSort Record; Grabs $30 Million

Hadoop distributor MapR Technologies recently announced that it had set a new world MinuteSort record using Google's cloud-based compute offering. Following up on that, the company just raised a further $30 million in investment.

Google Among 31 Vendors Interested in Building the CAT

Google is one of 31 information and technology vendors and exchanges that have expressed an interest in submitting formal bids to build the Consolidated Audit Trail, or CAT.  Formal bids must be made by April 25, with a decision on a winner due this summer, and with ratification of that taking place in December.

Bloomberg, Orange Integrate Messaging, Voice for Compliance

Bloomberg has joined with Orange Business Services - Trading Solutions to help firms archive and manage voice records of their business transactions.  Bloomberg's cloud-based Vault enterprise information service is the host for the integration.

Verdande and ITRS Link Provides Early Warning for System Outages

Continuing to work with application monitoring solutions, case-based reasoning specialist Verdande Technologies has forged a partnership with ITRS Group in order to create an "early warning system for potential trading outages, system failures or other latency-impacting events."