Alibaba and pals: We all SQream for GPU-powered databases – here, take $26.4m

GPU-accelerated analytics company SQream has won $26.4m in B-round funding with lead investor Chinese multinational Alibaba tossing in cash following its cloud collaboration deal earlier this year.

SQream provides a data warehouse DBMS that has repetitive low-level code running on Nvidia GPUs to speed up analytics.

The February deal it inked with Chinese giant Alibaba meant its customers can access SQream to set up, access and analyse data in Alibaba's cloud.

Data comes into SQream from primary databases, such as Oracle and SQL Server, using existing ETL tools. Newer stream tools can be used as well.

Supported hardware includes any servers with Nvidia Tesla, V100, P100 and K80 GPUs. Dell, HPE and IBM Power servers running Linux are in use by SQream customers. They use storage systems from DDN, Dell EMC, IBM, NetApp and X-IO, as well as software-defined storage.

How about E8 and Excelero and their NVMe-oF storage? CEO and co-founder Ami Gal wasn't able to comment on either. Twinning their fast access arrays with SQream's database would seem a natural fit.

SQream has direct sales in North America and is looking for partnerships elsewhere. It already has deals with ACL Mobile in India and AIS in Thailand. Gal said: "We didn't think we would have so many successes in Asia.

"We definitely wanted to hit China... We'll move to other markets as Alibaba is aggressive and wants to expand."

Other data warehousers and analytics database suppliers may be asking their engineers and tech architects to look at getting some brute force GPU grunt too. ®