Solix and Data Fabric

Solix has a core data platform on which there are four main areas of functionality: enterprise data lake, archiving, content services and security/compliance. It is a multi-cloud architecture, with native support for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform and also the IBM and Oracle cloud offerings. There is a core data catalogue in which data is mapped, and there are over two hundred connectors to assorted source systems. Beyond just raw connectivity, there are specific knowledge bases for major applications such as SAP and Oracle, which have very large and complex data structures. Some of the Solix implementations are very large with one banking example being petabyte scale.

Fig 1 – Information Architecture for Enterprise Intelligence

Enterprise data archiving is one of the four main areas of functionality, and Solix manages data pipelines to lower cost storage based on data retention rules set up within its core catalogue. The security and compliance offering includes areas such as data masking, and the identification of sensitive data, so that enterprises can be confident about their compliance with regulations. The Solix product has support for data lineage, so provides traceability.

Fig 2 – Data fabric

It is the data lake functionality that is the most relevant for data fabric. Solix has search capabilities, both for structured and unstructured data, and these can be applied to any source that it is connected to. However in practice it can be difficult to deal with ad hoc distributed queries across a range of databases, particularly as such queries could interfere with the application performance of production systems. Hence most of their customers use Solix to bring data into a separate data lake, which itself can use either a SQL database (PostgresSQL compliant) or a NOSQL database like MongoDB, or native cloud storage such as S3 on AWS. In late 2023 Solix introduced an enterprise AI offering to early customers, allowing them to manage AI models from popular vendors like OpenAI and META, and to train such models on their own data lake data. This allows queries through natural language prompts as well as data visualisation and even sentiment analysis.

Solix offers a quite comprehensive solution to several aspects of data management. The product has a core data catalogue with significant data governance capabilities. It can connect to a wide range of data sources, from conventional databases like MySQL to applications like SAP HANA, NoSQL databases like MongoDB and even VSAM files, as well as streaming sources. Its wide range of customer deployments demonstrate that it operates at a considerable scale.  It is flexible in deployment, with multi-cloud support as well as the ability to run in a tightly controlled private cloud environment. The product has search capability across both structured and unstructured data, as well as links to various market-leading analytic tools to supplement its own offerings. The product has data preparation functionality, with hundreds of transformation and data quality checks built in, so Solix can be used as a data staging area, either to its own query engine or as a basis for loading into a separate data warehouse like Snowflake.

The bottom line

Solix has a broad range of functionality deployed at a wide range of customers. It has the core functionality needed for a data fabric architecture, though in practice most implementations are done via a data lake, which is a different approach to some other vendors. There are some definite advantages to this approach, with queries in the Solix platform not adversely affecting performance in the source systems. Provided that you are comfortable with this approach then Solix should be seriously considered, as its customer base is impressive and growing at a rapid clip.