Aster Data Systems

Infobox_Company
company_name = Aster Data Systems
company_
company_type = Private
foundation = 2005
location = Redwood City, California United States
key_people = Mayank Bawa – CEO and co-founder; Tasso Argyros – CTO, VP of Engineering, and co-founder; George Candea – Chief Scientist and co-founder; Shawn Kung - Senior Director of Product Management; Dheeraj Pandey - Director of Engineering; Steve Wooledge - Director of Product Marketing
num_employees =
industry = Data warehouse technologies, software and programming
products = Aster "n" Cluster – An MPP analytic database
revenue =
net_income =
homepage = [http://www.asterdata.com Official Website]

Aster Data Systems is a database software company headquartered in Redwood City, California. Aster "n"Cluster, the software product developed by the company, is a massively parallel processing (MPP) analytic database management system that runs on a cluster of commodity servers. The architecture of Aster "n"Cluster is optimized for data warehousing and analytic applications (also called OLAP - Online Analytic Processing, as opposed to OLTP - Online Transaction Processing). Its claimed benefits include the ability to provide high performance and scalability. The company also claims that the database includes automatic failure detection and self healing capabilities for high availability and single-click provisioning for manageability.

nCluster

Aster Data Systems designed nCluster to provide a high performance database that runs on industry standard x86 servers that could scale to multiple petabytes of data with low labor effort. Like other new generation MPP warehouses, Aster relies on data replication across 2 or more clustered servers to provide fault tolerance. Somewhat more uniquely, the product has the ability to perform many administrative tasks -- such as cluster rebalancing -- without taking the database offline.

Aster was one of the first two MPP analytic DBMS vendors to announce the integration of MapReduce with SQL [ [http://www.asterdata.com/product/mapreduce.html] ] . Aster's implementation differs from that of Greenplum, which introduced its own MapReduce/SQL integration the same day [ [http://www.dbms2.com/2008/08/26/why-mapreduce-matters-to-sql-data-warehousing/] ] .

Customers

As of October 2008, the company had 5 disclosed customers, although it has claimed "double-digit" customers in public interviews. When Aster Data Systems exited stealth mode in May 2008, MySpace was already operating the "n"Cluster platform on more than 100 nodes capable of analyzing 360 terabytes of data. Aggregate Knowledge’s advertising network Pique Discovery Network, Acerno, ShareThis and Inside Media are other disclosed customers.

History

Aster Data Systems was founded by three colleagues in the Ph.D. Computer Science program at Stanford University: Mayank Bawa, CEO, focused on algorithm design for querying large distributed data systems; Tasso Argyros, CTO and VP of Engineering, investigated network and software issues involved in the design and implementation of large-scale data clusters; and George Candea, Chief Scientist, focused on high-availability technologies for large-scale computer systems.

External links

* [http://www.asterdata.com www.asterdata.com]

* [http://www.asterdata.com/blog Winning With Data: The Aster Data Systems Blog]

* [http://www.dbms2.com/2008/09/02/introduction-to-aster-data-and-ncluster/ Introduction to Aster Data and nCluster]