小公司顛覆存儲業大野心 衝擊百億美元數據庫大市場

Name any enterprise application today, and it's a pretty safe bet that it's deployed on a relational database management system. Since the 1980s, RDBMS technology has been the go-to solution for storing and retrieving information about almost anything, from finances to widgets to people. Oracle (ORCL), IBM (IBM), and Microsoft (MSFT) are among the companies leading the way; SAP and Teradata (TDC) are also competitors.

可以肯定的是，如今不管哪款企業級應用，一定都會用到關係型數據庫管理系統（RDBMS）。自從20世紀80年代以來，無論信息類型是關於金融、小插件，還是人員，RDBMS就一直是存儲及恢復幾乎所有類型信息的首選方案。甲骨文公司（Oracle）、IBM公司和微軟公司（Microsoft）無疑是業界翹楚，SAP公司和天睿公司（Teradata）也是強勁的競爭者。

Then big data came along. Newly exploding volumes of data made the limits of existing RDMBSes painfully clear. "Buyers now want, and expect, immediate answers to questions that previously may have taken companies minutes, hours, days to answer," said Bruce Cleveland, a general partner with InterWest Partners.

隨後大數據橫空出世。爆炸式增長的海量新數據使目前RDBMS的侷限一目瞭然，也着實惱人。風投公司InterWest Partners普通合夥人布魯斯o克利夫蘭稱：“以前企業可能花上幾分鐘、幾小時、甚至好幾天來回答客戶的問題，但今天，客戶希望立即馬上就有答覆。”

In a consumer-facing business, a buyer may want to know, "Is it in stock?" In a B2B business, the buyer may want to know, "What is your best price?" And they want to know immediately. "With data volumes increasing, companies have had two poor options: Either live with sub-optimal performance or 'scale up' their traditional databases using extremely expensive hardware," Cleveland added.

在面向消費者的行業裏，客戶可能想了解“有現貨嗎？”而在B2B行業裏，客戶可能想知道“最優惠的價格是多少？”而且他們希望馬上就能獲得答案。對此克利夫蘭補充稱：“隨着數據量的猛增，企業現在只有兩個次優選擇：要麼維持欠佳的業績，要麼用極其昂貴的硬件‘升級’傳統數據庫。”

That's where Splice Machine comes in. Much the way IBM recently announced a "scale out" storage offering that allows large companies to scale capabilities without massive investments, so Splice Machine aims to do the same thing for large databases.

Splice Machine正是抓住了這一契機。就像IBM公司最近宣佈要“向外擴展”存儲產品，讓大公司無需鉅額投資也能升級存儲能力一樣，Splice Machine也瞄準了大型數據庫提供類似服務。

'The best of both worlds'

兩全其美的方案

An alternative to today's RDBMSes, Splice Machine effectively combines traditional relational database technology with the scale-out capabilities of Hadoop, the de facto standard for big data architecture at Yahoo (YHOO), Facebook (FB), and most other major companies. Whereas Hadoop is best known for its power to perform batch analytics, Splice Machine focuses instead on operational applications and real-time analytics.

作爲目前RDBMS的替代方案，Splice Machine有效地將傳統關係型數據技術與Hadoop向外擴展的能力相結合，而後者實際上正是雅虎公司（Yahoo）、Facebook公司及其他大企業大數據架構的標準。儘管Hadoop以執行批量分析而著稱，但Splice Machine主攻的卻是業務應用和實時分析。

"Splice Machine is aiming to turn the common wisdom on its head with a solution that combines the best of both worlds: The cost-effective, scale-out performance of Hadoop and compatibility with common RDBMS/SQL processes -- such as data cleansing, customer roll-ups and ETL work -- and applications like Cognos, Unica, SAS and SPSS," Charles King, a principal analyst withPund-IT, said.

諮詢公司Pund-IT首席分析師查爾斯o金稱：“Splice Machine的目標是顛覆傳統觀念，提供一種充分結合兩大領域優勢的解決方案，也就是：Hadoop的經濟實惠、向外擴展的性能，及其與通用RDBMS/SQL操作——如數據清理、客戶上卷和提取轉換加載（ETL）——以及像Cognos, Unica, SAS和SPSS這類應用的良好兼容性。”

Splice Machine's aim is to convince businesses to replace traditional databases such as MySQL and Oracle with their own, Cleveland said, with promises of high performance, accuracy, and reliability.

克利夫蘭表示，Splice Machine的目標是，憑藉高效能、精確性和可靠性等承諾，說服企業客戶用他們的產品替換掉MySQL和Oracle這類傳統數據庫。

"[Businesses] get high performance from scaling out onto clusters of inexpensive servers," he said. "And because Splice Machine supports native SQL, companies can do this without having to rewrite their applications."

他說：“（企業）可以通過將數據向外擴展到相對廉價的服務器集羣中獲得高效能。同時，由於Splice Machine支持原生結構化查詢語言（SQL），企業可以無須重寫應用就能實現這一點。”

'Scalability nobody has been addressing'

“前所未有的可擴展性”

Last week, Splice Machine -- which was founded two years ago and is backed by $19 million in funding from InterWest Partners and Mohr Davidow Ventures -- launched its Hadoop-based database into public beta. Fifteen companies already use the technology, including the San Antonio, Texas-based marketing services company Harte Hanks. Splice Machine said Harte Hanks observed improvement to the ratio of price to performance by more than 10x compared with its existing Oracle RAC databases. (Splice Machine offers the standalone version of its database on a freemium basis for testing; otherwise, it's $5,000 per node.)

Splice Machine創立於兩年前，獲得了來自InterWest和Mohr Davidow Ventures兩家公司共計1900萬美元的投資。上週，Splice Machine發佈了基於Hadoop的公測版數據庫。已有15家公司採用了這項技術，包括德克薩斯州聖安東尼奧的營銷服務公司Harte Hanks。Splice Machine稱，Harte Hanks發現與其現有的Oracle RAC數據庫相比，系統的性價比提高了十倍多（Splice Machine提供的用於測試的標準版數據庫免費；否則每個節點收費5,000美元）。

"We think this will disrupt the $21 billion database market," Monte Zweben, Splice Machine's co-founder and chief executive, told Fortune. (Gartner estimates the market to be worth $26 billion and growing at nine percent annually.)

Splice Machine聯合創始人兼首席執行官蒙特o茲魏本告訴《財富》雜誌（Fortune）：“我們認爲這款產品將顛覆價值210億美元的數據庫市場。”【高德納公司（Gartner）則估計該市場價值爲260億美元，年增長率爲9%】。

Previously, Zweben worked at the NASA Ames Research Center; he also founded Blue Martini Software.

茲魏本早先效力於美國宇航局艾姆斯研究中心（NASA Ames Research Center），此前還創立過“藍色馬提尼軟件公司”（Blue Martini Software）。

"The majority of competitors that are trying to apply this scale-out technology are focused on analytical apps," Zweben said. "What we think may be more valuable is powering real-time apps, where a concurrent set of users are reading and writing to the database at the same time. That's scalability nobody has been addressing, and that's what we do."

茲魏本稱：“大多數想要應用這種向外擴展技術的競爭對手都專注於分析應用。而我們認爲更有價值的可能是支持實時應用，也就是同時在線的一組用戶在同一時間讀取、寫入數據庫。這是無人曾涉足過的可擴展性，也正是我們現在的主攻方向。”

'A category-disruptive company'

“一家顛覆業界的公司”

In many ways, Splice Machine democratizes what huge companies "with 50 and countless Java programmers" can do, said Bill Ericson, a general partner at Mohr Davidow, which participated in the company's Series A and Series B financing rounds.

Mohr Davidow公司普通合夥人比爾o埃裏克森稱，Splice Machine在很多方面讓那些“擁有50個博士和無數Java程序員”的大公司所能做的事普及化了。這家公司參與了對Splice Machine的A輪及B輪投資。

"One of the problems with these data-intensive technologies is, they work great if you have really smart but the average enterprise has limited resources," Ericson said. With Splice Machine, "the costs are probably 10 to 25 percent of trying to do this with something like Oracle. Users don't have to buy all new software and all new tools, and not only do they save on the fundamental infrastructure, but they don't have to throw out the window everything they built over the last 25 years."

他說：“現有這些數據密集型技術的一個問題是，如果企業擁有聰明絕頂的博士，這些技術就能大顯神通，但一般企業的資源很有限，”而使用Splice Machine的產品後，“成本只有用Oracle這類產品的10%到25%。用戶沒必要購買所有的新軟件和新工具。他們不僅能省下大筆的基礎設施開銷，而且不必拋棄過去25年來辛辛苦苦打造的一切。”

Splice Machine's model "dramatically changes the economics of scaling databases," Cleveland said. "One of Splice Machine's customers had their queries speed up by three to seven times while reducing costs by over 75% compared to their current database solution."

克利夫蘭稱，Splice Machine的模式“極大地改變了數據庫擴展的經濟性。Splice Machine的一位客戶反映，與其目前的數據庫解決方案相比，他們現在的查詢速度提高了三到七倍，同時成本卻降低了75%。”

For InterWest Partners -- which participated in Splice Machine's Series B -- the company is "an example of investing in what we believe could be a category-disruptive company," he added. "Since Splice Machine supports standard SQL, it has the potential to replace -- disrupt -- the traditional database suppliers by offering a low-cost, high-performance, scale-out database solution without companies having to rewrite their existing applications, which is what the NoSQL and NewSQL companies require in order to use their solutions. With Splice Machine, the same programmers who wrote the existing SQL applications can easily and simply use Splice Machine without any specialized skills or training."

他進一步表示，對InterWest Partners公司來說——它參與了Splice Machine的B輪投資——這家公司“正是我們深信將顛覆業界的典型企業。因爲Splice Machine支持標準SQL，它有潛力通過提供低成本、高效率、向外擴展的數據庫解決方案代替（或者說顛覆）傳統的數據庫供應商，而無需讓企業重寫現有應用。相反，要用NoSQL和NewSQL公司的解決方案，就必須重寫現有應用。依靠Splice Machine，編寫現有SQL應用的程序員可以無須具備任何專門技巧或培訓就能輕鬆使用Splice Machine的解決方案。”

A potential acquisition target

一個潛在的收購對象

It remains to be seen whether Splice Machine can deliver on its promises and whether RDBMS vendors have reason to worry, Pund-IT's King said.

Pund-IT公司的金表示，關於Splice Machine是否能兌現承諾，以及RDBMS供應商是否會因此憂心忡忡，這兩點還有待觀察。

"The answer to the first is found in the accolades of the company's 15 pilot customers," he said. "Whether established vendors should be worried is harder to say. Any number of alternative vendors have tried to shake up the RDBMS market without much success to show for it."

他說：“從這家公司15家首先試用的客戶衆口一詞的讚揚可以發現，它的確沒有說大話。而傳統供應商是不是該感到擔憂就不好說了。很多曾一度想撼動RDBMS市場的供應商都鎩羽而歸，乏善可陳。”

Still, organizations are searching for ways to save money while supporting necessary business applications and processes, King said. Which means Splice Machine could be the subject of much interest.

金表示，很多企業在支持必要的業務應用和流程的同時，還在設法節約成本。這就意味着Splice Machine將會成爲很多公司青睞的對象。

"If it truly can deliver the goods, the company could do very well," King said. "[It could] even become an acquisition target by a traditional RDBMS vendor that wishes to capture a bit more big data magic while making life difficult for its competitors."

金說：“如果這家公司確實能交付好的產品，它肯定會蒸蒸日上。它甚至會成爲傳統RDBMS企業的收購目標，因爲這些企業既希望獲得更多大數據技術的魔力，同時又讓自己對手的日子不好過。”