Snowflake Redefines the Data Warehouse for the Cloud Era

General availability of new release brings enterprise-class data warehousing and new innovations to any scale of data, workload and users

SAN MATEO, Calif. – June 23, 2015 – Snowflake Computing, the cloud data warehousing company, today announced the general availability of the Snowflake Elastic Data WarehouseTM, the first data warehouse designed from the start for the cloud. The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse has a unique architecture that delivers the power of data warehousing, the flexibility of big data platforms and the elasticity of the cloud – at a fraction of the cost of other solutions.

The rapid adoption of cloud infrastructure and software services is driving a tectonic shift in enterprise IT. That shift is causing organizations to reexamine their data warehousing technology, seeking solutions that are more than just conventional software repackaged in the cloud. By developing a completely new data warehouse specifically for the cloud, Snowflake not only makes enterprise-class data warehousing available with the rapid deployment and elasticity of the cloud, but also delivers new innovations in performance, scalability and ease of use that go beyond the limits of today’s data warehouses and big data platforms.

“The cloud has changed the game in data warehousing,” said Bob Muglia, CEO of Snowflake Computing. “However, simply ‘cloud-washing’ a conventional data warehouse misses that opportunity. Organizations want to get more value from their data, not simply bring their current challenges into the cloud, or worse, create problems by deploying complex solutions that force them to retrain their staff and abandon existing tools and processes. From day one, Snowflake has had a singular focus on reinventing the data warehouse, building from the cloud up to solve the data analysis needs of customers.”

The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse is an all-new SQL data warehouse delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS) in the cloud. Snowflake’s patent-pending architecture breaks from convention by centralizing data in low-cost, scalable cloud storage, while allowing diverse users and workloads to run concurrently without performance degradation. Snowflake handles the infrastructure, availability, security and optimization so that users can focus on what matters to them – loading and querying their data.

This release delivers key innovations including:

  • Native support and optimization for diverse data. Snowflake supports both traditional structured data and machine-generated, semi-structured data in a single database engine, without requiring transformation and without sacrificing performance or flexibility.
  • Multi-dimensional elasticity. Snowflake can scale data, workloads and users up and down in minutes, without downtime or disruption and without impacting performance.
  • Self-tuning service. Snowflake adaptively manages and tunes data distribution, data storage, metadata and query execution based on actual workloads, without knobs or manual tuning.
  • Extreme data and service availability. Snowflake’s data warehousing service is fully distributed and resilient across multiple data centers at all layers. Data is stored in fully replicated storage and can be recovered instantly using Snowflake’s Time Travel feature.
  • Enterprise-class security. Secure authentication, granular access control and industrial-grade encryption for both data in-flight and on disk are provided as always-on features for all customers.

The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse was created by a team of industry veterans that holds over 120 patents and has decades of experience in databases and data processing at companies including Actian, Cloudera, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Teradata.

In a separate announcement today, Snowflake also disclosed $45 million in new funding from leading venture capital firms Altimeter Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures.

Availability

The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse was introduced in October 2014 and is generally available immediately. For more information, contact Snowflake at [email protected].

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Supporting Quotes

“Using Snowflake, we’ve been able to simplify our data pipeline, keep more data available for analysis, and do all of that significantly faster and cheaper than our previous on-premises solution. Snowflake just works, allowing us to take people and money that would otherwise be spent on care and feeding of the data warehouse and instead focusing them on developing new analytics.”

– Britt Crawford, VP analytics & asset management, Rafter

“The decoupling of compute and storage, the simplicity of SaaS and the pay-for-what-you-consume model made it easy to choose Snowflake compared to any of the legacy alternatives we considered.”

– Ananth Reddy, SVP & CTO, MyPoints

“We chose Snowflake to help power the web performance reporting and analytics that we provide our customers because it differentiated itself from the alternatives. Snowflake is awesomely fast, allows us to store data at a low cost and deploy exactly the compute capacity needed, and does all of that without requiring tuning or tweaking.“

– Matt Solnit, founder and VP of engineering, SOASTA

“Snowflake’s novel design gives us great performance without the complexity of traditional data warehousing. The native support for semi-structured JSON data, the flexibility to scale up or down at any time, and the strong SQL support allow our team to bypass most of the steps in building a traditional data warehouse so that they can focus on analyzing data instead.”

– Seth Strumph, CTO, DealBase

About Snowflake

Snowflake Computing, the cloud data warehousing company, has reinvented the data warehouse for the cloud and today’s data. The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse is built from the cloud up with a patent-pending new architecture that delivers the power of data warehousing, the flexibility of big data platforms and the elasticity of the cloud – at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions. The company is backed by leading investors including Altimeter Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures. Snowflake is headquartered in Silicon Valley and can be found online at snowflake.net.

Media Contact
Danielle Salvato-Earl
Kulesa Faul for Snowflake Computing
(650) 922-7287
[email protected]