Peaxy Enhances Capabilities to Manage Massive Data Sets in Industrial R&D

Peaxy’s mission is to support the data access needs of enterprises with product lifecycles extending over many decades. Typical prospects are F1000 enterprises such as energy, automotive, aviation and life sciences.

Located in San Jose, Calif., Peaxy has grown to about 45 employees since its founding in 2012. The company closed its Series B in September 2015. At its core, the company provides data solutions based on subscription licensing.

International Data Corporation (IDC) substantiates the significance of Peaxy’s mission by valuing its potential at over $4 billion for tools that support industrial R&D, analysis and Web infrastructure.

Terranova emphasized that the prime reason that prospects call is their need for a new data-centric business model to cope with the massive amounts of unstructured data—on a petabyte or even exabyte scale—often residing in multiple silos in their IT infrastructure.

Throughout our discussion, Terranova used the expression “three crown jewels” of an R&D environment: geometry, simulation and telemetry data. Thus, the likely buyer would be engineering management desiring a solution without IT assistance and seeking a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) of their IT infrastructure. From a competitive standpoint, protecting an enterprise’s service margins is a motivating factor.

We discussed typical applications demanding “longevity,” another critical dimension to big data’s volume, velocity and variety. He emphasized that longevity is a key value of Aureum’s capabilities. Also, the ability to commingle these three data sets in a single namespace for analysis is important to recognize. For example, an engineer can compare telemetry readings to specs and the simulations that validated the design. With long-term storage management, R&D can access data for as long as 50 years, the typical life span of an aircraft, for instance.

Aureum’s design intent is to deliver an easily accessible data infrastructure based on software-defined storage management that allows the use of commodity servers to reduce TCO as conditions evolve. This patented methodology does not require any extract, transform and load activities. It assures that file pathnames are maintained; no links are broken in a constantly changing hardware environment.

Terranova stressed that new searching capabilities was one of the significant enhancements. Now with the popular Solr source search technology, users can search for words in the model or masthead of documents in their native formats. Indexing is updated continuously as data is created or modified, not when files are moved, which enables users to search these data sets without straining the network.

With the need to process massive amounts of data, Aureum is compatible with Hadoop and Spark (for cluster computing with high in-memory processing). Their use is possible with interoperability using interfaces such as POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface).

As Terranova asserted, “Users have the option to perform analyses on Aureum, either on or off the premises, supported by the integrity of the pathnames.”     

Our discussion of several use cases brought out an attractive Aureum application—the ability to work outside of product lifecycle management (PLM). For instance, for ease of use, one company kept their large (multigigabyte) simulation files freed from the management of PLM.

Finally, Terranova stated that product leaders, engineers and other subject matter experts could now exercise the search functions and apply advanced analytics that gain strategic value: predictive maintenance, Internet of Things, design reuse and more.

For more information, visit www.peaxy.net.