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Yellowbrick reckons its all-flash data warehouse array is a wizard idea

Here's a disk-bound query: What's inside the box?

Startup Yellowbrick Data has built a turnkey, hyperconverged, all-flash box that it has claimed can replace up to seven disk-based data warehouse racks with less than half a rack and speeds disk-bound query executions.

The pitch is simple: replace spinning disk data warehouses with an all-flash one. The software stack has been written to assume flash storage instead of disk.

The hardware is a 12-inch rack enclosure, but Yellowbrick has released no internal component details whatsoever.

We're told it has a modular design allowing customers to scale up to petabytes of data by adding analytic nodes on the fly. The system is designed for high data ingest levels. Customers can run mixed workloads, including ad hoc queries, large batch queries, business reports, ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) processes and OBDC (Open DataBase Connectivity) inserts simultaneously.

It includes networking, storage, CPU, scheduling and an optimised analytic database with autonomous administration. That looks like a hyperconverged system to us.

Yellowbrick said the system has a simple pricing model with predictable costs – again no details are provided – and that it's aimed at Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies. Example application areas include:

  • Large-scale data visualisation
  • Retail and consumer behaviour
  • Security analysis and fraud detection
  • Telecom billing and reconciliation
  • Electronic health records processing
  • Real-time pricing analysis
  • Digital marketing analysis

Yellowbrick was founded in April 2014 by CEO Neil Carson, chief revenue officer Jim Dawson and principal architect Mark Brinicombe.

Carson was a CTO and EVP at Fusion-io from March 2010 to May 2013, the month co-founders CEO David Flynn and CMO Rick White left. Dawson was also an EVP and chief sales officer at Fusion-io until the end of 2013. He also sits on Kaminario's board. Brinicombe was a principal architect at Fusion-io, leaving at the same time as Dawson.

Fusion-io was bought by SanDisk in 2014.

Yellowbrick picked up an impressively large $44m A-round in 2016 and shipped its first purchased product in 2017. The company is based in Palo Alto and has around 50 employees. Its customer list includes Overstock.com, Symphony RetailAI and TEOCO Corporation.

+Reg Comment

The on-premises disk-based data warehousing world has been upset by the rise of Snowflake and its data-warehouse-as-a-service business model, which is essentially getting customers to ditch their massive data warehouse data centre kit for its cloud service.

Yellowbrick Data says much of the same, but has provided little detail to back up the claims. You can request a demo and more information here. ®

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