We just shipped and installed the Kickfire appliance in the data center of our first web 2.0 customer this week. We’re very excited about this new customer. With already over a million active members, this company continues to grow in spite of a challenging economic environment because it has a clearly defined audience and a business model which adds value to its members while adding money to its coffers. Part of the value add to their member base comes from well-targeted discount and coupon offers. In order to achieve this, the company runs complex analytics to understand members’ behaviors and responses and uses this data to help its advertising customers better target their offers.

As with many web 2.0 companies, this customer has built its application on MySQL. MySQL has helped them scale their web application well but was presenting performance and scalability challenges for their analytics. With their fact table in the …

The demand for high-tech appliances has been on the rise in the last few years. Their benefits — including high performance, low TCO, rapid time-to-value, and ease of use — have driven adoption in a variety of industries from data warehousing to network and security management, storage, retail, telephony and so on. As the analyst firm, Forrester, noted in a 2008 report:

“Appliances - in all their proliferation - are here to stay and are moving into the mainstream of computing and networking”

It turns out that the database of preference for a growing number of appliance vendors is MySQL. As noted on its appliance page, MySQL’s benefits of low TCO, ease of use, and rapid time-to-value map well to the requirements of appliance offerings.

As appliance markets have matured and competition has increased, there …

Sun Microsystems slashes jobs in major restructuring. SpringSource gets Groovy with G2One. Novell goes after Red Hat. Sonatype confirms Marc Visser as new CEO. Neil Young’s new car. And more.

Press releases
Sun Microsystems Aligns Business with Global Economic Climate and Amplifies Growth Opportunities Across Open Source Platforms Sun Microsystems

SpringSource Acquires G2One Inc SpringSource

Novell Announces New Program to Aid Transition to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Novell

Zenoss Adds …

It’s been a crazy month here at Kickfire which is why I have fallen a bit behind on my postings – a new product, new customers, a new CEO, a new relationship with Sun/MySQL, a new website … and a new baby girl! Here’s a quick summary of all that has been going on:

New Product
We quietly came out of beta a month ago. After nearly two and half years in development, this is a great achievement for the company. The team took on a hugely ambitious project: to re-design how SQL is processed today to be able to deliver an order of magnitude improvement in price/performance relative to any other data warehousing solution on the market. This project involved bringing together over 50 of the industry’s smartest database and hardware engineers to build a new type of database machine that includes the world’s first SQL chip, an ultra-modern database kernel, and advanced system features. Kickfire’s four data …

After receiving an email about talking with Robert David, Director of Sales at KickFire, I checked out recent news on KickFire, as there had been little written about this company aside from the big splash they made at the MySQL Users Conference back in April 2008.And, lo and behold, there was a piece of news, posted on October 14 - Kickfire Enters Into MySQL Enterprise Agreement With Sun

Kickfire was recently selected by Network World as one of 10 Open Source Companies to Watch. First of all, the disclaimer: we are not an open source company. As any of you reading this blog know, Kickfire is an appliance company. So, why then did we appear on the list? The link of course is MySQL.

The Kickfire appliance was built to run MySQL for high-performance business intelligence and data warehousing workloads. So, while we are not an open source company, we are very much what I would term as an “open source-based business”. Now, for those who track the data warehousing market, it might seem that a lot of vendors could claim that mantle as a large proportion have code that is derived from PostgreSQL. However, that’s not what I mean by an open source-based business. So, how would one …

In April this year, Kickfire announced the first high-performance appliance for MySQL. As part of the announcement, the company released data warehouse benchmark results that broke prior records in terms of price/performance and performance in a non-clustered environment. While the creation of a new appliance built exclusively for MySQL along with the benchmark records was noteworthy, perhaps the bigger story lies in what we believe to be the beginning of a paradigm shift in the database world - one marked by the advent of the first SQL chip.

To give some context to this story I have included a graph below which depicts the evolution of VLSI (Very-Large-Scale Integration) semiconductor technology and its growing impact on a broadening range of industries.

…

As Matt Asay recently mentioned in his post about Kickfire, the company just closed a Series B for $20 million. In today’s credit-scarce market where VC funding is flat/declining, $20 million is a lot of money, especially for a company whose product is still in beta. What’s more, there seems to be an investment bubble in the broader data warehousing space in which Kickfire participates (at last count, there were over two dozen vendors, the majority of which are relatively new entrants) and that bubble looks like it is starting to burst as witnessed by Microsoft’s recent acquisition of DATAllegro. So, are the Kickfire investors misguided or is there something more here …

Following on from the announcement at the MySQL conference where Sun and Kickfire jointly announced data warehousing benchmark records, we have just announced new TPC-H benchmark records. Specifically, the Kickfire Database Appliance 2400 is the highest price/performance offering at 300GB, again breaking the $1 barrier for the first time coming in at 89 cents per QphH (Queries per hour on the TPC-H benchmark). The 2400 is also the highest performance (non-clustered) offering at 300GB.

I’m not going to further dwell on the numbers in this post other than to quickly point out another aspect of this achievement that Justin noted in his blog related to the energy savings the Kickfire …

Kickfire has announced (as of April 14th, 2008) record breaking results in the TPC-H(tm) Price/Performance category at 300GB and also in overall performance in the non-clustered category at 300GB.
You can find the official results here on the TPC(tm) (Transaction Processing Performance Council) website:
http://www.tpc.org/tpch/results/tpch_price_perf_results.asp
http://www.tpc.org/tpch/results/tpch_price_perf_results.asp?resulttype=noncluster

While the amazingly low price of the Kickfire Database Appliance 2400 will grab you (only about twice the price of a typical 4U MySQL database server) -- the amazing performance per watt is truly incredible. The 3RU Kickfire appliance used in the 300GB volume test consumes …