Sonian is using the Vertica Analytic Database for the Cloud to enable customers to store and search hundreds of terabytes of data to find e-mails, instant messages and other electronic data in just a few mouseclicks, Vertica announced Sonian's hosted service, running on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) computing infrastructure, enables companies ranging from small startups to global enterprises to archive vital electronic data in a secure, scalable, virtual data center to support security and regulatory compliance business initiatives without traditional in-house data center costs.

Sonian offers digital content archiving in a software-as-a-service model that lets companies pay for only the data they are archiving for as long as they want it archived. The company's flagship application, Sonian Archive SA2, archives customers' digital content, indexes it, and makes it accessible via a Web portal. Sonian uses Amazon EC2 and the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to offer the SA2 application as a service to customers. Having the grid-based, column-oriented Vertica Analytic Database for the Cloud also available on-demand using Amazon Web Services enabled Sonian to bring its solution to market faster and without having to incur expensive in-house database server start-up and administration costs. Additionally, Vertica's blazing query performance and aggressive data compression help Sonian deliver value to its customers, enabling them to archive more content and have more people search it faster and in more ways. It also ensures that the system scales as Sonian's customer base and archived data grow.

"Sonian was looking for both cost-effective and scalable computing power that reduced time to market for their digital content archiving offering," said Steve Rabuchin, Director of Developer Relations and Business Development for Amazon Web Services. "Having the Vertica Analytic Database available on-demand in Amazon EC2 enables software-as-a-service innovators like Sonian to give customers faster, more affordable and more scalable access to business analytic data."

Digital content on demand
The Sonian Archive SA2 hosted archive solution uses the Vertica Analytic Database for the Cloud to enable customers to search their e-mail stored on the Amazon Simple Storage Service. For example, a financial services firm will be able to quickly search many terabytes of archived e-mails and other digital content to find a series of messages related to a specific type of transaction that occurred within a one-year period - without investing millions of dollars on the infrastructure to have the same capability in its data center.

"Sarbanes-Oxley and other federal and industry mandates are going to continue to drive the need to effectively archive digital content," said Sonian Chief Technology Officer Greg Arnette. "So we knew we were going to need a cloud database that not only delivered fast query response, but also easily scaled to meet demand. The Vertica Analytic Database for the Cloud was the obvious choice. It offered unbeatable performance with no administration overhead and will scale within the cloud as our customer base, and their archives grow."

The Vertica Analytic Database for the Cloud is an on-demand version of Vertica's blazingly fast, grid-based columnar database, hosted on Amazon EC2. Vertica for the Cloud can be provisioned in minutes on a cluster of one or more cloud computing nodes on a pay-as-you-go basis. It provides companies with the fastest time to terabyte for large, high-performance analytic data marts without upfront data center costs and delays.

The following innovations enable Vertica to manage terabytes of data 50x to 200x faster and more reliably than any other cloud database:

• "Scale-out" grid architecture - handles changing workloads as elastically as the cloud
• Aggressive data compression - keeps storage costs low
• Automatic high availability - provides replication, failover and recovery in the cloud

"Sonian is a progressive company that knows the significant potential that cloud computing presents," said Vertica Systems CEO, Ralph Breslauer. "By combining affordable, flexible digital archiving with scalable, hyper-fast querying against enormous databases, Sonian is providing a remarkable security and compliance solution to its customers. Together, Sonian, Vertica and Amazon give companies confidence that they will find the answers they need on demand."