Actian Zen 15 delivers multi-platform support for secure data management from edge to cloud

Actian announced the general availability of its new Zen V15 embedded database for mobile and IoT. Actian Zen V15 addresses the demanding needs of today’s on-premise, cloud, mobile, and IoT application developers by providing persistent local and distributed data across intelligent applications deployed in enterprise, branch, and remote field environments. Actian’s Zen V15 database delivers breakthrough levels of performance and has been certified to work with the Intel OpenNESS and Smart Edge MEC platforms.

“Edge applications and devices increasingly rely on unsupervised machine learning inference at the edge to improve automation and real-time decision-making,” said Lewis Carr, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Actian. “Actian Zen V15 edge data management delivers against a broad and demanding set of requirements including leveraging a variety of hardware architectures, operating environments, networks, communications interfaces, and languages to offer comprehensive support, performance, and the flexibility modern enterprises need to stay competitive.”

The third generation of Actian’s Zen database family, Actian Zen V15 software, connects mobile and IoT devices to gateways, the cloud, and traditional on-premise databases. The Actian Zen V15 offering is a cloud-ready edge database that embraces the cloud ecosystem, harnessing the power of advanced architecture to eliminate ETL and latency, while also reducing security risks associated with decryption and vulnerable or exposed code.

In addition, Actian’s Zen V15 database delivers breakthrough modularity and performance on IoT and mobile devices, gateways, laptops, desktops, servers, and cloud platforms, redefining modern edge computing and maintaining backward compatibility for remote and branch office environments. Customers can use Actian’s Zen database to leverage the power of 5G wireless broadband for fast and secure data processing at the edge and in the cloud.

“The flexibility to run the same database with local AES 256-bit encryption and underlying file formats at the device, gateway, edge server, and cloud environments provides a way to avoid decrypting until actual operations are performed at the point of action without transformations or added security vulnerabilities,” said Desmond Tan, Senior Director of Engineering and Product Management for the Zen database product line at Actian.

“We’ve run performance tests for large data writes and reads, a core application scenario between devices at the edge and the network infrastructure against SQLite and MySQL, and found that we have higher performance for each individually – as well as together.”

Other key benefits and features of the Actian Zen V15 database family include:

• Third generation multi-platform mobile and IoT device support, zero-DBA, zero-ETL architecture solution for multiple modes including time-series, transactional, and document-centric.
• Integrates with a broad spectrum of programming languages including C++, Java, and Python.
• Offers ANSI-compliant SQL and common NoSQL APIs for a single database across a wide range of data types, deployment targets, and projects to reduce risk and streamline operations.
• Runs in Docker containers with Kubernetes orchestration, Helm chart configuration for deployment, and supports multi-access edge computing.
• Auditing and replication functionality via SQL can be performed in database at the edge.
• Delivers up to a 90% increase in overall SQL query performance, zero penalty data updates, no change configuration, and extensive support for legacy file formats.
• New time-series functionality for real-time, automatic collection, auditing, and delivery of data by mobile and IoT devices.

Edge data management that locally supports persistent data as well as device to device, device to gateway, and device to the cloud is essential to meeting latency, security, and sovereignty requirements for 5G and MEC environments. Actian’s Zen offering is a database partner for various edge applications optimized for Intel Smart Edge Open to build and provision innovative edge services. Actian customers and partners applaud the Actian Zen embedded database.

“We’re a long-standing partner with Actian, embedding PSQL and now Zen into our Manufacturing ERP product portfolio,” said Chris Okamuro, Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of R&D at Global Shop Solutions. “Our product line offers support for a broad range of manufacturing and transportation and logistics customers, from quote to cash, and their environments are rapidly incorporating IoT. We’ve extended our use of Zen data management solutions embedded in our ERP software from server and thick client to include web-based and local and distributed data at the point of action on IoT devices.”

“Actian Zen’s license system is quite simple and allows us to save costs,” said Shinji Nishimura, Advisor to IT Section for Material Handling Project Management Division at Tsubakimoto. “From our first adoption to the present, we have considered changing databases several times, but when it came to an actual performance test, other powerful databases could not reach Actian Zen’s reading and writing speed at all.”

“The system has been updated every five years and the database version has been updated every time, but the database access part of the system has been virtually untouched,” said Toshihiro Asakawa, Deputy GM of Data Marketing Group, Account Sales Department, Consumer Sales Headquarters at Hitachi Global Life Solutions. “I think that’s the beauty of using Zen, it’s so hassle free.”

All members of the Actian Zen V15 edge data management product line are now generally available and are free to developers for use in non-production environments and in time-limited trials for production use. Perpetual and subscription licensing options are also available.