Cray Targets Enterprise Big Data With New Open Agile Analytics System

SEATTLE, WA--(Marketwired - May 24, 2016) -   Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced the launch of the Cray® Urika®-GX system -- the first agile analytics platform that fuses supercomputing technologies with an open, enterprise-ready software framework for big data analytics. The Cray Urika-GX system gives customers unprecedented versatility for running multiple analytics workloads concurrently on a single platform that leverages the speed of a Cray supercomputer.

The size, scope, and complexity of big data analytics is exploding and creating problems for customers who are already struggling with cluster sprawl, a torrent of new applications, and increasing pressure to deliver faster insights. The Cray Urika-GX system is designed to eliminate these challenges of big data analytics. Cray's new agile analytics platform combines the unique scale and throughput capabilities of Cray supercomputers with the convenience of an appliance, the flexibility of industry-standard hardware, and an open software framework that enables customers to innovate as they run existing and emerging analytics workloads. The Cray Urika-GX system gives customers a powerful tool for delivering high-frequency insights.

Optimized for demanding analytics workloads, the Cray Urika-GX system is pre-tested and pre-integrated with the Hortonworks Data Platform providing Hadoop® and Apache Spark®, as well as the Cray Graph Engine, designed for solving the largest and most complex graph analytics problems. The system includes enterprise tools, such as OpenStack for management and Apache Mesos for dynamic configuration -- all designed to protect customers' investments in the rapidly-changing big data software landscape.

"The Urika-GX is a dynamic analytics solution that brings out the best of Cray's decades of expertise in providing our customers with world-class systems for data-intensive computing," said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. "Customers have asked us to blend the unique features of our product lines into a single platform for data analytics. We took the Aries system interconnect from our supercomputers, the industry-standard architecture of our clusters, the scalable graph engine from the Urika-GD appliance, and the pre-integrated, open infrastructure of our Urika-XA system and combined them into one agile analytics platform. The Urika-GX gives our customers the tool they need to overcome their most advanced analytics challenges today, and the platform to bridge to tomorrow."