We are pleased to announce the latest release of KX Streaming Analytics 4.5, our uniquely integrated platform that powers data-driven decision-making on both real-time and historical data.

It is used across multiple industries from finance to Formula 1 racing, and from manufacturing to utilities, where terabytes and petabytes of data need to be captured and analyzed at ever-increasing speeds to support mission-critical applications.

In version 4.5, we have extended our capabilities across a range of areas with special focus on some of the key challenges faced by IoT environments where the continuity of data ingestion, processing and analytics can be especially demanding. We started with a simple, but ambitious, mission statement: Enable customers to maintain 24×7 uptime, with no interruption and no data loss in analyzing all of their data, across any environment, instantly.

What’s driving this demand is that organizations are deploying high-resolution sensors to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their operations and products through analytics and automation.

Firstly, it’s all about data, so getting data ingested as quickly and reliably as possible is critical for supporting accurate decision making.

In this release, we have extended our parallelism options for enabling multiple, simultaneous loading processes. We have also extended support for variable data rates to cater not only for streaming data but for micro-batch updates where required. This builds on our existing capabilities to ingest and process structured and semi-structured, relational and reference data, that is so critical for performing analytics in context.

Devices never sleep and as a result, data never stops. So IoT has particularly stringent needs for continuous 24/7 operation to maximize yield and eliminate downtime, especially in areas of automation.

Therefore, the ingestion and the processing that follows must not only be fast, it must also be continuously available and resilient to hardware and infrastructure failures.

KX Streaming Analytics enables applications to achieve “always-on” operation through a combination of high-availability cluster configurations with node-level quorum determinations. Node-level quorum capabilities prevent split-brain or split-primary conditions in the event of network failures. A choice of hot/warm/cold configurations and data replication options are available based on the cost/risk profiles that must be supported so that detection and resolution of failures are swift and appropriate.

Fault tolerance is not fault elimination. So functionality must be in place to ensure that there is no loss of data availability or integrity in the case of disruption.

Continuous ingestion is achieved through real-time mediation across redundant data feeds ensuring, supported by flexible storage options, from local storage, SAN to cloud. Advanced query routing ensures the delivery of consistent and accurate results across distributed databases and nodes at any point in time. This makes KX ideal for powering analytics for detecting faults, processing financial transactions, performing reconciliations and settlement calculations involving streaming and historical data.

The onslaught of data continues. Predictions vary but some estimate the world will be generating 175 zettabytes annually by 2025, of which 90 would be from IoT alone.

So drawing context and insights quickly is ever more important, and ever more challenging. It demands scalability not just for storage but for additional processing capacity too. New capabilities range from flexible storage options to help contain costs to clustering, partitioning and sharding configurations to accelerate analytics. In combination, they tap the elasticity of cloud-based computing resources to deliver cost-effective low-latency response times in delivering actionable insights.

Business needs are not static and processing needs can change quickly, and unpredictably.

Often overlooked are the needs of DevOps to plan for and respond to change. In 4.5 we provide advanced monitoring and alerting features for maintaining system health and early detection of processing bottlenecks. Swift and non-disruptive remediation is enabled through on-line upgrades to database schemas, APIs, analytics and code ensuring no downtime to your applications and access to your data.

The features and requirements above are not peculiar to the IoT world, of course.

Instant and sustained processing is equally critical for burst conditions around non-farm payroll announcements and index rebalancing in finance, for example, where the demands of availability, scalability, reliability and accuracy are equally stringent. 

Our new functionality makes it quicker and easier for clients to integrate streaming analytics into their business processes and applications to achieve high-performance data-driven decision making and actionable insights that can transform their business. Sample use cases include:

Situational awareness to gain rapid insight into  production processes, assets, or consumer behavior

Analytics to predict events, failures, and take corrective action

Triggering changes or taking control action automatically or generating an alert referral for human intervention in an automated process

The common theme, as we captured in our mission statement, is the ability to maintain 24×7 uptime, with no interruption and no data loss in analyzing all data across any environment, instantly.  KX Streaming Analytics makes that achievable: one vendor, one technology, one platform to analyze and visualize real-time and historical data simultaneously.

KX Streaming Analytics 4.5 is now available on general release.