Greenplum pricing
Edit: Actually, this post is completely incorrect. The $20K/terabyte is for software only. So far, my attempts to get Greenplum to estimate hardware costs have been unsuccessful.
Greenplum’s Scott Yara was recently quoted citing a $20K/terabyte figure for Greenplum pricing. That naturally raises the question:
Greenplum charges around $20K/terabyte of what?
According to Greenplum’s Ben Werther, that turns out to be a figure for user data. I.e., it includes a software license for that many terabytes, plus sufficient hardware to run the system.
Glad to have finally gotten that much, I didn’t probe further with questions such as “What quantities does one have to buy for the price to average out to $20K/terabyte of user data?” or “Is that list price, or the actual effective price after the inevitable discounting?”
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I think you raise a good point. Given the Sun X4500 hosts have either 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 or 1 TB drives, one can store up to 4 times as much data (compared to the smallest drive) and not get any better performance from the hardware. I’ve heard that some Greenplum customers have had to add more hardware because the system they were sold did not perform, but it held all their data. To me, it seems that only having 4 CPU cores is a bit on the small side for up to 6 TB (or 8.5 TB) of uncompress data, which is citing from your post on spinning disk. I suppose it depends on how much data is being stored vs. how much is actually queried.
BTW – what mechanism is used to measure “user data”? That seems to be a grey area.
One of Greenplum’s licensing options is per-TB-of-actual-user-data. This is a common industry practice. Vertica definitely does that, and without checking my notes I’m pretty sure Infobright does too.
Sun is now using the 4550 on the GP DW, so – two quad cores now versus 2 dual cores in the older 4500.
[…] Getting information about Greenplum pricing is not always easy. However, a bit was disclosed in a recent Greenplum blog post, which said: … roughly $200k … For that amount you get the hardware, software and services to stand up around a 4TB (usable) Greenplum DW … […]