Intel and Aerospike Hot Data Webinars 7.12.2020

Thank you everybody who participated in Intel and Aerospike Hot Data webinars on Monday! Here is a photo collage from the webinar, and the cool stuff on hot data we discussed.

Lead-up

Intel team wanted to introduce to Finnish audiences our great database engine partner Aerospike. So we prepared a broadcast studio in Helsinki, wrote an article in Finnish in local ICT media Tivi and built up some excitement in Linkedin and Twitter.

For a hot webinar you need a cool host, and who could be more topical person during these masked times than Ilkka “Ile” Uusivuori. He hosts the Finnish version of Masked Singer. We simply had to put use some of that as well, so we had “clue packages” in the studio.

Actual event

We started with an Intel address on how we are doing and what kind of company we are in Northern Europe. On both accounts, we are growing. As for how to start with hot data, I explained the free of charge data strategy effort we offer, as well as similar sprints for AI, cloud and edge computing. We’ve also defined a rapid ICT re-strategizing pack for energy sector.

I summarized what Optane Persistent Memory is – a manufacturing innovation 10 years in the works, a combination of atomistic storing of data, multi-layer as opposed to single-layer internal structure, bit addressability so it can be used for memory operations. And as a really fast disk.

Andrzej Jasnikowski from Aerospike then provided for a primer on the company. Founded in Silicon Valley in 2009, Aerospike has more than 100 employees worldwide and over 200 customers. Products are the payable Aerospike Enterprise Edition database and a free of charge Community Edition for prototyping and testing.

Andrzej walked through company’s advantage which is simplified infrastructure (in layman’s terms much less servers) and predictable performance at any scale (“much more oomph”). Aerospike software has been able to reduce 200 servers to 30 while tripling the performance (“whoa!” in layman’s terms). One key aspect of that is Aerospike’s patented flash-optimized storage layer.

The baton was then passed to Geoff Clark. Geoff described to us some Aerospike reference customers findings. All of them were as cool as hot data customers can ever be. I made specific note on Charles Schwab (14th biggest bank in the U.S.) study which was a mainframe offload exercise. Quite interesting numbers - $10.000 saved. Per day.

Then it was my colleague Dr. Georgios Kardaras to present what Optane Persistent Memory is about. He told us about a recent IDC study foreseeing 175 zettabytes “in the datasphere” by 2025 which is huge. But more interestingly, 30% of that would be real-time data and for that, the market (we and you) needs new technology.

Georgios explained Optane Persistent Memory is persistent, meaning the data stored in the DIMMs stays there even across power cycles, like with disks. The technology, which is often called 3D Xpoint (“three-D cross point”) allows for much less latency, from about 80 microseconds on ordinary NAND SSD drives to less than 10 microseconds. When used in the DIMM form factor, we can avoid PCI bus overhead plus all those things so CPU can talk directly to the data, latency is further decreased to less than 1 microseconds.

We then put back on the screen the “London Boys” and provided a hot data battle. I said as a call to action to customers “this is the future for real time data, do you want to join us?”, adding that we can provide strategy effort to help justify investments into hot data technologies.

Georgios added that Intel has lab facilities, customers can test run the combination. Andrzej asked for customer to get in contact, referred to the freely available Community Edition for testing. Geoff echoed that and asked audience to contact Aerospike for testing & partnering.

Ile asked me what perfect data strategies look like since that was promised in our LinkedIn promo video. I said good looks like solving people, process and technology around data. Many Finnish enterprises have the people, what we would help with are rules and instruction docs. I said what we think of a strategy is that it should help justify additional technology investment – due to the rising needs on hot data, I think they are unavoidable.

Another question was about migrations from other databases, would Aerospike have experience of that? Yes, and example were on the slide material earlier in the event from other DB engine providers. Andrzej said augmentation of existing environments is also possible, for example in the fashion of mainframe offloading. Aerospike has connectors for these scenarios. Geoff added that Aerospike is available from the cloud as well, and it is seamless should hybrid co-existence be a requirement.

Key takeaways

Ile then gathered us back to where we started the event. Real cool enchantment is at customers’ disposal from Intel and Aerospike – a lot more performance with much less kit. How wonderful is that?