A company called Vertica is taking dead aim at the hardware-based data warehousing market with a new cloud-based virtual appliance it says can get the job done cheaper and more easily.

The Vertica Analytic Database runs as a virtual appliance within a VMware environment, eliminating the expense of specialty hardware even while it improves management capabilities and speeds up deployment, according to the company. The system has what Vertica describes as the "world's fastest analytic database" that can deliver query results 50 to 200 times faster than existing systems by virtue of a unique columnar MPP architecture and a proprietary data compression scheme.

The system uses a minimum of disk I/O operations, which allows the company's own data center to hold larger volumes of response data than other cloud providers. Warehouse capabilities can also be scaled more easily by adding greater numbers of Vertica instances in the VMware environment.

The system is shipped with a self-contained Linux operation system, although it can run on any OS that VMware supports, which would include Windows and Solaris.

The system is slated to become available next month.