Blog: Richard Hackathorn

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Data Warehouse Appliances: A Sign of the Times

I received an email from Tera-Tom, a good colleague who has established a solid reputation designing and implementing large-scale data warehouse (DW) systems based mainly on Teradata. His full name is Tom Coffing, CEO of Coffing Data Warehousing.

His email stated that Tera-Tom is morphing into Netezza-Tom, DATAllegro-Tom, and even Greenplum-Tom. In other words, he is incorporating these DW appliance products into his system integration work. This announcement caught my attention, having recently completed a research study with Colin White on "Data Warehouse Appliances: Evolution or Revolution" for the BI Network. A key issue is whether DW appliances are mature and robust enough to support enterprise DW systems. Tom seems to think so!

I chided Tom a bit by challenging him to declare that DW appliances are now respectable for enterprise DW by large corporations.

I received the following reply: “There are some big companies like Amazon.Com that truly are using appliance vendors as their EDW. It depends on what queries are running. Because appliances have recently come of age, many companies already had their EDW in place. So, many of the largest, most loyal, and staunch supporters of traditional EDW vendors have begun implementing a multi-vendor strategy. Instead of allowing a single hardware vendor to hold them hostage, they have utilized appliances to perform certain EDW functions. It is a strategy that improves performance, saves costs, and gives them options and negotiating power. If you have seen the recent pricing on traditional EDW products, you might want to keep your options open. The bottom line is that traditional EDW vendors are no longer the only games in town. I thought I would never say that so I am almost as surprised as you.”

So, Tom is observing that mature DW companies are moving to a multi-platform strategy that may appropriately include DW appliances. And, the reasons are not all technical.

I think that the observations by Appliance-Tom are a sign of the times for enterprise data warehousing. They are a-changing...

Posted by Richard Hackathorn on Thursday, 26 July 2007 | Permalink