The Greenplum side of EMC has unveiled what it claims is the industry's first complete Big Data analytics appliance.

The thing is a tweak of the company's two-socket Xeon EMC Greenplum Modular Data Computing Appliance (DCA) and combines a shared-nothing MPP relational Postgres database with enterprise-class Apache Hadoop and third-party BI and ELT applications.

It's supposed to co-process both structured and unstructured data in a single machine.

Scott Yara, vice president of products of Greenplum, says co-processing means "the fast, bidirectional sharing of structured and unstructured data between relational and Hadoop modules within a single appliance to allow each system do what it does best and achieve a whole that's much greater than the sum of its parts."

Greenplum says that as data warehouses get bigger, enterprises are facing scalability, performance degradation and management complexity. They also want to give more concurrent users access to their data for business applications.

It claims DCA's "revolutionary" modular architecture will completely change how enterprises think about scaling by letting them start small and expand the appliance in quarter-rack increments based on performance or storage capacity needs up to a six-rack cluster.

There are four DCA modules: a data-warehousing appliance module that integrates database, computing, storage and network; a high capacity module for multi-petabytes of data; a Hadoop module that marries Hadoop with the Greenplum Database; and a Data Integration Accelerator (DIA) module that hosts third-party analytics applications and enables data-loading performance in a parallel and scalable model to shorten batch loads or implement micro-batch loading.

Users can start with one rack and either the standard or high-capacity Greenplum Database quarter-rack module. There's room for three additional modules that can be added any which way. Authentication, query optimization, load balancing and fault tolerance is built-in. All modules link via a redundant, high-performance, low-latency interconnect.

Pricing seems to be a secret.