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For Immediate Release

Franz’s AllegroGraph^® Sets New Record on Intel^® Xeon^® E7 Platform

AllegroGraph and Intel’s E7-8870 Xeon Processor platform combine to achieve industry leading 310 Billion RDF Triple Result – A major step toward “A Trillion Triples”

OAKLAND, Calif. — June 7, 2011 — Franz Inc., a leading supplier of Graph Database technology, with critical support from Intel, today announced an advanced Semantic Technologies project to be the first on any platform to load and query a NoSQL database with a trillion RDF statements on a single large-scale Intel-based server platform.  RDF (also known as triples or quads), the cornerstone of the Semantic Web, provides a more flexible way to represent data than relational database and is at the heart of the W3C push for the Semantic Web.

“Intel-based servers run the vast majority of today’s Web,” said Pauline Nist, General Manager, Mission-Critical server segment, Intel Data Center Group. “With this result, Franz has demonstrated that even the most demanding, large-scale Semantic Web sites of the future can achieve breakthrough performance on the Intel Xeon® processor platform.”

A trillion RDF Statements eclipses the current state of the art for the Semantic Web data management but is a primary interest for companies like Amdocs that use triples to represent real-time knowledge about telecom customers. Per-customer, Amdocs uses about 4,000 triples, so a large telecom like China Mobile would easily need 2 trillion triples to have detailed knowledge about each single customer.

The 310 billion triple result that Franz is announcing today was achieved in only two weeks of access (actual loading time of just over 78 hours) to an 8-socket Intel Xeon E7-8870 processor-based server system configured with 2 terabytes of physical memory and 22 terabytes of physical disk. 

“We’re confident that with additional time, another terabyte of memory, and a bit more storage capacity, the previously unreachable goal of 1 trillion triples can be achieved.  Even double that is not out of the question.” stated Dr. Jans Aasman, CEO of Franz, Inc.

Bill Guinn, CTO of Amdocs Product Enabler Group recently said, “We run the biggest Oracle installations in the world for telecom companies and we will keep using them the foreseeable future. However, we just couldn't make our intelligent Amdocs Intelligent Decision Automation work in a relational database. We needed the flexibility of a triple store to make this new personalized predictive CRM application work. So now we have an application that works with literally tens of other relational databases and unstructured data sources, which turns information into triples so we can raise the bar on customer experience.”

Dr. Aasman said, “Some people have asked, “Why not do this on a distributed cloud system with Hadoop?” The quick answer: NoSQL databases like Hadoop and Cassandra fail on joins. Big Enterprise, big web companies and big government intelligence organizations are all looking into big data to work with massive amounts of semi-unstructured data. They are finding that NoSQL databases are wonderful if one needs access to a single object in an ocean of billions of objects, however, they also find that the current NoSQL databases fall short if you need to run graph database operations that require many complicated joins. A typical example would be performing a social network analysis query on a large telecom call detail record database.

Graph database technologies are delivering value to the Enterprise and we are seeing accelerating adoption,” added Dr. Aasman. “Our joint efforts with Intel to achieve this Industry record offers an unbeatable combination of software and hardware to further corporate adoption of scalable Graph database technologies, like what we see at Amdocs.

Techniques like MapReduce and NoSQL products based on them are fine for some problems,” said Mitch Shults, Mission-Critical Segment Strategist, Intel Data Center Group. “To achieve high performance against meaningful amounts of triplestore data, however, you just can’t afford to be traipsing all over the network to pull things together. This result demonstrates the incredible value that affordable large-scale, big-memory server platforms built around the Intel Xeon E7 server platform can deliver for next-generation workloads like triple stores.

The joint Franz/Intel effort has already produced significant results on the road to 1 Trillion.  Dr. Aasman will be discussing  “Querying a Trillion Triples” on June 7th, at the 2011 Semantic Technologies Conference in San Francisco, California.

About Franz Inc.

Franz's semantic technology solutions help bring Web 3.0 ideas to reality. The company is the leading supplier of commercial, persistent and scalable Graph Database products. AllegroGraph is a high-performance database capable of storing and querying billions of RDF statements. The product provides solutions for customers to combine unstructured and structured data using W3C standard RDF for creating new Web 3.0 applications as well as identifying new opportunities for Business Intelligence in the Enterprise.  AllegroGraph’s Activity Recognition package provides a powerful means to aggregate and analyze data about individual and organizational behaviors, preferences, relationships, plus spatial and temporal linkages between individuals and groups. Franz customers include Fortune 500 companies in the government, life sciences and telecommunications industries. For more information, visit franz.com.

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