HPE Gobbles Up Ampool To Add SQL Grunt To Ezmeral

HPE is adding SQL processing power across different data sources to its Ezmeral portfolio by buying startup Ampool.

Ezmeral is HPE’s containerised application framework. The portfolio covers Container orchestration and management, AI and machine language, data analytics, cost control, IT automation and AI-driven operations, and security. SQL-based high-performance advanced Ampool analytics will shortly be added to that list.

Anant Chintamaneni, HPE Ezmeral Vice President and General Manager, issued an announcement on the company blog, which read: “I am thrilled to announce HPE’s acquisition of Ampool, an innovative developer of a data platform designed to deliver a cloud-native, high-performance SQL analytics engine for data engineers and business analysts. Ampool will join the HPE Ezmeral software organisation, and will play a pivotal role in accelerating HPE Ezmeral analytics runtime for interactive SQL workloads."

Ampool

Ampool was started up in the San Francisco Bay area in February 2015 by Milind Bhandarkar to create an Ampool Active Data Store (ADS) using an in-memory analytical caching layer to provide real-time processing of data in different storage sources. Below is a video of Bhandarkar giving a talk on trends in data storage and analytics.

Youtube Video

According to Crunchbase, it has taken in just $400,000 in funding from an August 2019 seed round involving six investors. The HPE acquisition cost has not been disclosed.

Bhandarkar was the first CEO and is now the CTO, having ceded the CEO role to Kumar Ganapathy in 2018. Ganapathy, a co-founder of Western Digital-acquired Virident, has since left but is still sitting on the board.

A Bhandarkar blog announced: “Ampool’s team and products have found a perfect home in HPE Software’s flagship Ezmeral containerised compute and data fabric, and we are looking forward to extending the high-performance hybrid analytics capabilities of HPE Ezmeral.”

ADS is “based on Apache Geode (OSS version of Pivotal Gemfire) and integrating it with prominent compute frameworks in the Hadoop ecosystem, such as Apache Hive, Apache Spark, and Presto. In addition, with HBase-like APIs any transactional SQL on HBase, such as Apache Traffodion and Apache Phoenix, could be run on top of Ampool ADS, making it a single store for both analytical and transactional SQL-based workloads with high performance expected from any in-memory system.”

This idea of combining transactional and analytic database workloads is also espoused by SingleStore, whose technology is based on MemSQL [PDF] with in-memory technology.

Firebolt, an Israeli startup, also accelerates SQL processing, employing the public cloud. There is also an in-memory angle to Firebolt, as sparse indexes of huge datasets can be loaded into memory.

Ampool has its Hub – “a single pane of glass interface for visibility across the fragmented data landscape, and introduced connectivity to a variety of data sources, including data lakes, data warehouses, NoSQL & RDBMS systems, and data streams (such as Apache Kafka).” The overlap with SingleStore and Firebolt is quite extensive.

Chintamaneni said HPE will be “adding Ampool’s technology components and open-source expertise to the Ezmeral portfolio [which] will over time turn into a set of SQL acceleration services made available through the HPE GreenLake cloud platform.” ®