A recent upgrade to IBM Corp’s SmartCloud enables the cloud computing product to run copies of SAP AG’s in-memory database platform HANA and provides the Big Blue product with new data analytics features.
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Other companies also offering cloud computing platforms meant for enterprise-scale data analysis. Among them are EMC and VMware’s subsidiary, Pivotal and Google’s Big Query service.
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IBM said DB2 is receiving a collection of new technologies called BLU Acceleration which is meant the accelerate data analysis by 25 times or more, Picciano said.
BLU, which stands for big data, lightning fast, ultra easy, offers columnar processing which reads only the needed columns of a database table skips over items such as duplicate entries. BLU makes use of multiple processor cores for faster queries as well as compression technology to scrimp on space taken up by data sets.
Every DB2 instance on SmartCloud can run up to 16 processor cores, which can manage one terabyte or more of memory.