Yellowbrick Data is a data warehousing and analytics startup that offers a modern data warehouse designed for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Their solution aims to help companies gain faster insights from their data through improved performance, lower costs, and simplified management compared to traditional data warehouses.
Overview
Yellowbrick Data was founded in 2014 and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. The company offers a software-defined data warehouse that leverages flash memory and remote direct memory access (RDMA) networking to provide high performance for both analytics and transactional workloads. Some key capabilities of Yellowbrick Data include:
- Hybrid cloud architecture – Can deploy across on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud environments.
- Massively parallel processing (MPP) – Distributed query processing across many nodes for fast performance.
- Flash-optimized – Uses flash storage for faster data access compared to spinning disk.
- Workload management – Concurrent support for transactional and analytical queries.
- Simplified management – Automated administration and tuning.
Yellowbrick aims to modernize data warehousing by tackling pain points like complexity, cost, and slow performance that many companies experience with traditional offerings. Their solution is targeted at organizations in industries like financial services, retail, healthcare, and manufacturing that require real-time insights from their data.
Unique Technology
Yellowbrick utilizes technology they call the Yellowbrick Data Warehouse to deliver high performance analytics and simplify data warehouse management. Here are some key components of their technology stack:
Hybrid Architecture
The Yellowbrick Data Warehouse is designed as a hybrid cloud solution, allowing deployment across on-premises data centers, private clouds, and public clouds. This provides flexibility to manage data where it makes the most sense based on cost, security, and regulatory requirements. Data can be replicated across sites for high availability.
MPP Database
At the core is a massively parallel processing (MPP) SQL database, which uses distributed query processing to quickly analyze large volumes of data across many nodes. It includes a shared-nothing architecture and a columnar database for fast analytic query performance.
Flash Storage
Yellowbrick utilizes flash storage in place of spinning disk in each node to optimize data access. Flash provides lower latency and higher throughput compared to traditional hard disk drives.
Workload Management
The system can concurrently run transactional workloads for ingesting and processing real-time data along with analytical workloads to power dashboards and complex queries. This avoids having to choose between a transactional or analytical database.
Automated Tuning
Yellowbrick includes automated administration, tuning, load balancing, and query optimization capabilities to simplify data warehouse management. This removes the manual work typically required for tasks like tuning SQL queries.
Use Cases
Yellowbrick Data targets large enterprises across many industries by promising faster insights, at lower costs, while simplifying operations. Some common use cases include:
Real-time Analytics
The high performance data warehouse lets companies analyze fresh streaming data in real-time to improve decision making. This helps with use cases like fraud detection, ad targeting, or monitoring manufacturing sensors.
Hybrid Cloud Deployments
Yellowbrick supports hybrid cloud architectures across on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud. This provides flexibility for managing regulations, latency, and costs across different environments.
Cloud Migration
Customers can use Yellowbrick to migrate an existing data warehouse to the cloud for improved scalability, automation, and costs. The workload management helps migrate transactional applications.
Machine Learning
The fast performance and concurrent workloads help power machine learning applications that require ingesting and analyzing large volumes of data.
Conclusion
In summary, Yellowbrick Data offers a modern data warehouse solution designed to improve the analytics process through greater performance, simplified operations, and lower costs compared to traditional offerings. The hybrid cloud architecture, use of flash storage, and automated management capabilities aim to address common data warehousing pain points. Companies across many industries leverage Yellowbrick to gain faster insights from their data across transactional and analytical workloads in real-time. As data volumes continue to grow, Yellowbrick Data provides an option to modernize data warehousing in the hybrid cloud era.