Data Warehouse Appliance

What is Data Warehouse Appliance?

• The data warehouse appliance is an architecturally integrated package of hardware, database technology and software specifically pre-installed and pre-optimized for the data warehousing.

Features

• Data warehouse appliance supports massive parallel processing architectures to provide high query performance.
• Data warehouse appliance provides solutions for the mid-to-large volume data warehouse market.
• It is offering low-cost and high performance most commonly on data volumes in the terabyte to petabyte range.
• The top three features for data warehouse appliances were high performance, data scalability, high reliability and availability.

History

• The concept of low-cost and integrated hardware and software for doing data intensive operations first appeared in the 1980s in the form of database machines.
• These machines were designed primarily to offload processing from expensive mainframe computers.
• Interest in database machines waned with the advent of cheaper client/server computing solutions.
• After a hiatus of many years, interest again perked up as companies began to face increasing costs for handling the rapidly growing data volumes in their data warehouses.
• The result was the emergence of the data warehouse appliance.

Types

• Native data warehouse appliance where the hardware and software is tightly integrated into a single data warehouse solution. The software and hardware are not individually licensed and cannot be separated.
• Software data warehouse appliance where commercial or open source relational DBMS software is designed and/or optimized for data warehouse processing. The software supports hardware solutions purchased from one or more third-party vendors.
• Packaged data warehouse appliance where commercial software and hardware is tuned for data warehousing, is packaged and supplied by a single vendor, and is installed and maintained as a single system.
• Data management appliance that offloads data intensive operations from a host computer. The offloaded workload may involve operational, specialized analytics, or archival processing.

Leading Vendors

• The leading vendors of data warehouse appliance solutions, namely DATAllegro, Greenplum, IBM, Netezza, and Teradata.

Benefits

• Reduction in Cost – The total cost of ownership (TCO) of a data warehouse consists of initial entry costs, on-going maintenance costs and the cost of changing capacity as the data warehouse grows. DW appliances offer low entry and maintenance costs. Initial costs range from $10,000 to $150,000 per terabyte, depending on the size of the DW appliance installed.
• Parallel Performance – Many support mixed-workloads where a broad range of ad hoc queries and reports run simultaneously with loading. DW appliance vendors use several distribution and partitioning methods to provide parallel performance. Some DW appliances scan data using partitioning and sequential I/O instead of index usage. Other DW appliances use standard database indexing.
• Reduced Administration – DW appliances provide a single vendor solution and take ownership for optimizing the parts and software within the appliance. DW appliances reduce administration through automated space-allocation, reduced index-maintenance and in most cases, reduced tuning and performance analysis.
• Built-in High Availability – DW appliance vendors provide built-in high availability through redundancy on components within the appliance. Many offer warm-standby servers, dual networks, dual power-supplies, disk mirroring with failover and solutions for server failure.