With all of the attention focused on the war raging between Oracle and Hewlett-Packard on the server front, a significant HP announcement in late June seemed to slip under the collective radar of the industry press.

On June 20, the company announced general availability of Vertica 5.0, the newest version of the Vertica Analytics Platform, along with some integrated appliance-like bundles combining Vertica with HP hardware. HP purchased the company earlier this year (Register story here), and it looks like Vertica is going to be HP’s key play in the burgeoning ‘big data’ market.

The foundation of the Vertica platform is the columnar database which, as the name implies, handles data in columns. This column-centric design can yield huge advantages vs. traditional row-oriented databases in certain situations – primarily read-centric data warehouses. Query performance can be hundreds of times faster with a columnar database, since you only read the columns that you actually need for the query. According to the Vertica guys, they see their performance advantage vs. other databases ranging between 50-1,000x, which is quite a wide range indeed.

The Vertica reps I spoke with repeatedly made the point that their solution was designed from the ground up with high performance and high availability in mind. The database was designed to be columnar from the start, not just a column façade grafted onto an existing row-based DB.

They also took the MPP route to provide granularity, scaling, and availability advantages. Each node is completely self-contained and shares nothing with any of the others. Each node independently runs queries, but can enlist help from other nodes so that a query can use the power of the entire assembled system. It sounds a bit grid-like, but with every node a head node.

With this architecture, adding more nodes adds more capacity and performance in a near-linear manner. Plus a failure in one node won’t take the entire system down; other nodes can pick up the jobs on the failed node and complete them.

The Vertica DB uses standard SQL and supports all of the typical database-y stuff you’d expect. They also have added some advanced functions and a Hadoop connector to round out their big analytics story.

The best place to get the lowdown on the technical ins and outs of their solution is here. Clicking around yields a trove of technical info and a customer list that includes an interesting mix of the new (Groupon, Twitter, Zynga) and the old (Verizon, Comcast, Sprint, AT&T).

You can get Vertica as either a software-only package or in an appliance-like bundle on quarter-rack (96-core), half-rack (192-core), or full-rack (384-core) HP blade systems. While they didn’t talk prices in my briefing, they made it clear that the pricing is on the aggressive side. They’re aiming to be half the cost of competitive systems while offering several times the performance for the price.

And just who is their competition? Looks like Oracle and their flagship Exadata systems. While Vertica isn’t the right choice to replace the OLTP functions in Oracle’s Exadata box, it could potentially run rings around Exadata when it comes to data warehousing and hardcore analysis. Vertica’s software-only option automatically makes it more granular and flexible than Exadata – and probably significantly less expensive to acquire and maintain.

HP will be mounting a multi-front sales push with Vertica, utilizing the sales forces from their Business Critical and Industry Standard server/storage units along with Vertica’s existing sales personnel. Just as Oracle used a full-court sales press when they introduced Exadata2, I’d expect to see HP doing the same with Vertica.

As an independent company, Vertica landed 300 paying customers ranging from small to damned big. Combined with HP’s reach and range, Vertica might end up in thousands more data centers very soon.