Aster Data Opens European Headquarters in UK

Aster Data Systems, a proven leader dedicated to providing the best data analytics and management platform for 'Big Data' applications, has opened a European office in West London, England. Aster Data is a fast growing company headquartered in Silicon Valley that is focused on revolutionising data warehousing by providing a massively parallel data warehouse solution which integrates the popular Google innovation, MapReduce. Aster's unique solution enables large volumes of data to be stored and analysed so businesses can get fast answers to the most complex and data-intensive business questions. The office will be headed by industry veteran and newly appointed Europe Area Director Bob Pearson.

European customers can now be afforded the same benefits that clients like MySpace, ShareThis, Coremetrics, Specific Media and many others are already achieving by using the Aster data analytics and management platform. Aster Data also announced today its first European customer[ZAG1] , Pocket Kings, whose proprietary software powers the virtual online cardroom Full Tilt Poker. Full Tilt Poker will use Aster nCluster to provide better customer service to players, protect players from fraud, manage their increasing data volume, and lower their infrastructure costs.

"Traditional data warehousing must evolve to keep up with the intense data processing and analytics needs of today's enterprises who are dealing with terabytes and petabytes of diverse data," said Mayank Bawa, CEO of Aster Data. "Aster Data has already seen tremendous growth and customer adoption in North America, as clients realise we can uniquely provide them the best solution to meet their complex data warehousing and analytics needs. European customers in numerous industries, such as financial services and insurance, online retailing and social networking, communications and gaming, can now benefit from our award-winning solutions to manage and analyse vast amounts of data to deliver quicker business insight and speed business decisions."

"Our data warehouses are getting bigger, the analytic needs of today's enterprises are increasing, and the number of data-intensive applications are growing as organizations move to 'big data' applications. Next to that, our warehouse architectures have to be more flexible, easier to manage, and we have to reduce costs" said Rick van der Lans, independent BI analyst and chairman of the Independent Analyst Platform (IAP). "Innovative new technologies, such as those offered up by Aster Data, do make it possible to fulfill the needs of a new generation of big data applications while simplifying database architectures to drive down TCO."

Aster Data was the first company to enables enterprises to harness the power of MapReduce (popularised by Google) while managing their data in Aster nCluster, a massively-parallel processing (MPP) relational database for frontline data warehousing and analytics. Aster nCluster was also the first database system to offer enterprise-class MapReduce capabilities such as integration with Business Intelligence (BI) and extract/transform/load (ETL) tools, SQL support, backup and recovery, transactional data consistency, support for interactive as well as batch analysis, etc.

"Today's most demanding enterprise data warehouse (EDW) environments support petabytes of aggregated data, trillions of records, thousands of concurrent users and queries, complex mixed-query workloads, subsecond latencies, and continuous, high volume data loading," wrote Forrester analyst James Kobielus in a recent independent report, "Massive But Agile: Best Practices for Scaling the Next Generation Enterprise Data Warehouse" (Forrester Research, Inc., June 2009). "Information managers are adopting EDW best practices that push the scalability and performance envelope without sacrificing the agility to optimise this critical infrastructure to ever-changing analytic workloads. Some key best practices involve deploying 64-bit multicore EDW processing nodes, scaling out through shared-nothing massively parallel processing (MPP), pushing query processing to grid-enabled intelligent storage layers, applying efficient compression in the storage layer, and deploying preconfigured high-end EDW appliances."

Customers have industry-best flexibility with the Aster Data solution, which can be purchased as either an appliance, a software-only solution that can run on commodity hardware, or 'in-the-cloud' running on Amazon Web Services or AppNexus.

Aster Data Systems, Aster nCluster and the Aster Data Systems logo are registered trademarks of Aster Data Systems. All other brands and trademarks referenced herein are acknowledged to be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.