IT infrastructure vendor EMC Corp. announced Tuesday an agreement to acquireGreenplum, a Californian provider of database software which the buyer says is more effective in managing large amounts of data than the market incumbents. EMC did not disclose the price of the acquisition.

Greenplum’s product is based on a “shared-nothing” architecture, its key differentiator from most relational database management solutions by incumbents like Oracle orMicrosoft, whose databases use shared-disk architectures, according to Greenplum’s Web site. While delivering high transaction rates, the incumbent solutions sacrifice performance of individual queries and parallelism. 

The start-up’s solution is designed for virtualized x86-based infrastructures.


Visual representation of Greenplum's "shared-nothing" architecture. Image courtesy of Greenplum

“Greenplum's massively-parallel, scale-out architecture, along with its self-service consumption model, has enabled it to separate itself from the incumbent players and emerge as the leader in this industry shift toward 'big data' analytics,” said in a statement Pat Gelsinger, president and COO at EMC’s Information Infrastructure Products division. 

Adopters of Greenplum’s software include high-profile customers like NASDAQ OMX, NYSE Euronext, Skype, T-Mobile, Equifax and Fox Interactive Media. 

Once it completes the all-cash acquisition – expected in the third quarter – EMC will integrate Greenplum into its Information Infrastructure business. The buyer expects to combine the database product with its private cloud solutions.