05/20/2008

Aster Data Systems today announced Aster nCluster, a new solution to address fast growing data environments by transforming off-the-shelf, commodity hardware into a powerful, self-managing, and scalable analytic database.

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This platform makes it easy to drive deep insights from massive data sets to help organizations better understand customer behavior, monetize new opportunities, and control risk.

"In the next five years, the growth factors are 10X to 100X for data within companies. This calls for a fundamentally new approach to large scale analytics," said Richard Winter, President at Wintercorp. "As systems scale, the network increasingly becomes the bottleneck. Aster has announced a product that aims to address this and provide the engine for a host of new analytical applications, requiring larger scale and higher complexity than we have seen in the past. Organizations would then be able to get insights into the behavior and preferences of users that are not possible with traditional approaches."

MySpace, the world's most popular social network, has deployed Aster nCluster in their leading edge environment. Their deployment has over 100 nodes and has the capability of loading millions of rows per second. "With Aster, MySpace has the analytic horsepower and necessary scalability to meet our needs. The platform easily scales with our traffic growth and helps us better understand our users and improve their experience," said Jim Benedetto, Senior Vice President of technology at MySpace.

The key to the Aster nCluster architecture is a series of patent-pending algorithms and processes that control the placement, partitioning, balancing, replication and querying across clusters of intelligent nodes.

Aster has combined three distinct disciplines: database processing, networking and recovery oriented computing to tie hundreds of processors together to enable large scale data analysis with inexpensive hardware. With Aster’s software, systems are as easy to operate at 300 nodes managing a hundred TB’s as at 3 nodes managing a hundred GB's.

Aster nCluster is available now. Pricing includes the entire software stack to convert commodity hardware into an analytic appliance. Pricing is based on actual customer data and does not increase for disk space used for RAID, availability replicas, or temporary space.