On behalf of the Graphistry team, I am excited to officially announce: Hub Pro (Graphistry Hub for Professionals) is the next step of our vision of bringing GPU-accelerated visual graph analysis to everyone!
The launch is one step of many. One side of bringing GPU graph capabilities is usability features, like our recent end-to-end no-code graph analyzer, and with our database partners like Amazon Neptune and TigerGraph, graph app low-coding. However, the deployment modes must also match how different kinds of teams want to run Graphistry. For example, last year’s launch of the free Graphistry Hub Public tier has been enabling many individual data scientists and researchers to experiment. Likewise, half a year before that, we enabled teams to quickly launch private Graphistry instances via AWS Cloud Marketplace for less than the price of coffee and, just this month, on Azure too. However, some users had been left in an uncomfortable in-between: they need more data privacy than Graphistry Hub Public’s unlisted mode, but do not want to administer private cloud marketplace & Docker instances, nor pay the expenses of running always-on GPUs. Graphistry Hub Pro solves security, pricing, and maintenance for individuals, and the upcoming Hub Organizations for teams.
Hub Pro is new. Our public roadmap already includes useful stability, performance, and feature improvements. At the same time, users have already been successfully piloting Hub Public and Hub Pro, and we expect the new tier to be exciting for many because it combines more accessible pricing with the benefits of a managed service:
Hub Pro Pricing: Up to 95% cheaper through GPU sharing
For many users, the biggest win is the significant cost savings from not paying to run a dedicated always-on GPU platform. Graphistry Hub shares GPUs across our users, so instead of many GPUs that are infrequently used, we can run fewer ones, and users get time on available ones. Less obvious, the Graphistry team devotes significant time helping teams new to cloud/GPU/Docker administration, and while we are happy to do so, it also meant enterprise style pricing. With Hub Pro, GPU and administration expenses get shared across teams, and we are happy to pass on the savings.
When added up, the savings are big. An individual Hub Pro user on the annual plan pays only 5% of the cost of running the cheapest dedicated enterprise server! The savings are not always in Hub’s favor, or the most important deciding factor, but for many, the pricing is a big enabler for more accessible GPU computing.
A key enabler to why this works is that Graphistry users do not need to think about GPUs. Our high-level UIs and APIs make GPU acceleration an implementation detail. Teams can switch between Hub and self-hosted, or single-GPU and multi-GPU servers, and apps will keep working. Behind the scenes, the Graphistry team gets to keep focusing on driving costs down and increasing the ability of the tool to burst to saturate whatever hardware is available.
Professionally managed Graphistry service
Hub Pro is a Graphistry-managed service that builds on the success of Hub Public and our experience supporting teams all the way from startups to banks, utilities, and governments. Not all teams are equipped to professionally manage a GPU visual analytics platform 24/7, and even when they are, teams often rather spend their time and resources elsewhere. From analysts to developers to data scientists, Hub Pro makes maintained and secure GPU graph visual analytics use just a few API calls or clicks away!
The Graphistry team has been successfully operating Graphistry Hub for over a year, and we even started publishing service metrics:
- Uptime: 99.9% uptime over the last 3 months, with most months this year at 100%
- Security configuration & monitoring: Bot mitigation, …
- Upgrades: Daily/weekly
- Backups: Daily/weekly
As always, we are happy to assist enterprise administrators to achieve similar or better service levels in their private deployments. Our controls get built into the enterprise tier, and we can assist with configuration and maintenance.
Picking Cloud Marketplace, Enterprise, or Hub
While the Graphistry team is excited for what Hub opens for many in our community, it is just one of our distribution modes, and we expect that to remain true for the foreseeable future.
Sticking with self-hosted enterprise servers may still be cheaper for certain users. For example, individuals with only a few hours of use once or twice a year might prefer to use cloud marketplace servers and delete them when not active. More commonly, bigger teams may prefer the unlimited accounts of dedicated servers.
In bigger organizations, the deciding factor is often more about security, performance, or features. Many of our users prioritize security isolation and so often require self-hosting. As an extreme case of isolation, many of our financial and government users need the privacy guarantees of air-gapped deployments. Likewise, power users may want the built-in GPU notebook support or multi-GPU Dask/RAPIDS runtime, and want the isolation of dedicated GPUs that they can always saturate.
Ultimately, we want Hub to support extreme security and extreme performance. That is a long road, so we recognize that self-hosting will remain a more timely path for higher security and performance. For many teams, we even expect the choice to evolve over time!
Looking ahead
Hub Pro is geared for individuals such as consultants and scientists. We are also beginning to pilot the next tier, Graphistry Hub for Organizations (Hub Orgs), which enables multiple users and even teams to explore & collaborate over Graphistry Hub. In parallel, we are also working to bring features currently only in the self-hosted tiers like the database connectors & investigation automator. If these are of interest, we welcome you to reach out for early access.