Running an Eon Mode Database: Live in Vertica 9.1

Posted May 1, 2018 by Soniya Shah, Information Developer

white cloud in vault type room representing cloud computing
This blog post was authored by Sarah Lemaire. Before now, you could only operate your Vertica database in Enterprise Mode, the traditional Vertica architecture where your data is distributed across the local nodes. Now, Vertica 9.1, released in April, 2018, allows you to operate your database in Eon Mode, which was previously released as beta functionality. Operating your Vertica database in Eon Mode matches Enterprise Mode performance for executing your current workloads as well as supporting new workloads. The Eon Mode design reuses Vertica’s optimizer and execution engine. The metadata, storage, and fault-tolerance mechanisms have been re-architected to enable and take advantage of the shared storage. Running on Amazon EC2 compute and S3 storage, Eon Mode demonstrates the same great performance, superior scalability, and robust operational behavior that you’re used to with your Vertica database. You can rapidly scale an Eon Mode database to meet variable workload needs, especially for increasing the throughput of many concurrent queries. When running Vertica in Eon Mode, the storage layer of the database is in a single communal storage location, separate from the compute nodes. Data on the nodes is kept in the depot, an on-disk cache-like component. This intermediate layer of data storage provides a faster copy of the data that is local to each node. Data that is frequently used in your queries takes priority in your depot. The depot is also used to store newly loaded data before shipping it to communal storage. The advantages of running Vertica in Eon Mode are numerous: • Rapid scaling allows you to decouple cluster size from the data volume and configure your cluster based on your fluctuating computation needs. • The cloud environment handles failures gracefully. • Users can get started quickly, in less than 15 minutes. The Management Console GUI allows you to quickly create an Eon Mode cluster and manage your deployments. • Shared storage enables elasticity, making it time- and cost-effective to adapt cluster resources to fit the usage pattern of your cluster. It’s fast and easy to get an Eon Mode database up and running. But don’t take our word for it. Try it yourself! For information about creating a Vertica cluster on Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources and creating a cluster using an AMI, see Vertica on Amazon Web Services in the Vertica product documentation. For details about creating an Eon Mode database, see Using Eon Mode in the Vertica product documentation.