Voltron Data Theseus helps organizations solve data processing challenges

Voltron Data introduced Theseus, a distributed execution engine built to solve today’s data processing challenges at a scale beyond the capabilities of CPU-based analytics systems like Apache Spark.

Theseus is available to enterprises and government agencies as well as through partners – HPE is the first partner to embed Theseus as its accelerated data processing engine as part of HPE Ezmeral Unified Analytics Software.

Companies at the forefront of AI are constrained by data processing – ETL, feature engineering and transformation are key parts of AI/ML. They cannot ramp up AI capabilities efficiently because they cannot afford to build out big data CPU clusters fast enough. The performance divergence between GPUs and CPUs is only growing; this problem is getting exponentially worse.

“The end goal for organizations is to scale the use of AI. Scale data-driven decision making. Empower more stakeholders. Enable more complex analytical and predictive models. And it’s putting pressure on existing data systems. Data growth, analytical/application complexity and data movement will require organizations to rethink their data infrastructures when AI scale challenges and bottlenecks arrive. Voltron Data is solely focused on delivering a scalable data engine that unifies hardware, languages and frameworks to solve the eventual scale problem that organizations definitively will hit with existing data platforms,” said Mike Leone, principal analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.

“In the Era of AI, enterprises face a proliferation of data sources, abstraction of coding languages and strategic needs for every employee to be more data-driven. At the same time, Spark has reached its limits as an analytic processing system for the generation of Big Data. As the average enterprise now accesses over a thousand data sources, businesses must invest their data processing capabilities to support the next order of magnitude for analytics and AI demands. Voltron Data has taken an important step forward with this maiden voyage of Theseus to solve all of these data issues for the Era of AI,” said Hyoun Park, chief analyst of Amalgam Insights.

“Without a doubt, organizations capable of accessing, analyzing and acting on data in near-real time hold a distinct competitive edge over their rivals. It’s no wonder then that the majority of companies rank the ability to access high quality, secure and well-governed data assets as their number one investment driver, according to a detailed study of 320 analytics and data management professionals. Unfortunately, a constant influx of new technologies, data types and data sources together conspire to hold data processing back, turning what should be a crucial, timely asset into a costly performance bottleneck. What’s needed is a key to unlock this data at scale through an analytics acceleration engine that brings the benefits of hardware acceleration to data processing. That’s where vendors like Voltron Data come into play,” said Bradley Shimmin, chief analyst for AI platforms, analytics and data management at Omdia.

Voltron Data’s Theseus is the first distributed query engine built from the ground up to take advantage of full system hardware acceleration. This engine enables data system builders to unify data analytics and AI pipelines on GPUs while lowering vendor lock-in risk, energy consumption and carbon footprint. Theseus is:

• Composable – it seamlessly plugs into enterprise data platforms through open, modular standards, such as Arrow, Ibis, RAPIDS, Substrait, Velox and more. Customers don’t need to move their data; they can swap out engines based on their needs, and they can leverage their programming language of choice.
• Accelerated – it can run on accelerated semiconductors, such as NVIDIA GPUs, x86 and ARM processors, with plans to support more semiconductors in the future. This gives customers the flexibility to run on their hardware of choice while scaling up to the most demanding data sets and AI challenges.
• Embeddable – an industry first, Voltron Data offers a distributed query engine with a revenue share model instead of a pay-per-use model. Partners can build new or enhance data analytics products on top of Theseus so they can go to market faster, and Voltron Data only sees revenue when partners generate revenue. HPE is the first of these partners with GPU-accelerated analytics via Theseus now part of HPE Ezmeral Unified Analytics Software.

“Data processing and transformation is an emerging avenue for enterprises to improve the efficiency and flow of data for AI, ML and analytics workloads. With Theseus, Voltron Data’s composable query engine, enterprises can take full advantage of HPE Ezmeral Unified Analytics Software’s GPU-and-CPU optimized data lakehouse to turbo-charge data preparation, data processing and other traditionally CPU-based workloads,” said Mohan Rajagopalan, VP and General Manager of HPE Ezmeral Software.

Josh Patterson, CEO of Voltron Data, said: “AI systems are headed straight for The Wall – an inflection point where CPU-based big data systems reach peak performance and can no longer keep up with GPU-powered AI platforms. We won’t be able to keep up with AI demand at scale until data processing fundamentally changes. Data processing engines must leverage accelerated compute, memory, networking and storage. We are thrilled to introduce Theseus to the world – an engine that is built to leverage the latest hardware innovations and helps companies get over The Wall.”