Data warehouse appliances
If we define a “data warehouse appliance” as “a special-purpose computer system, with appliance administratibility, that manages a data warehouse,” then there are two major contenders: Netezza and DATAllegro, both startups, both with a small number of disclosed customers. Past contenders would include Teradata and White Cross (which seems to have just merged into Kognitio), but neither would admit to being in that market today. (I suspect this is a mistake on Teradata’s part, but so be it.) IBM with DB2 on the z-Series wouldn’t be properly regarded as an appliance player either, although IBM is certainly conscious of appliance competition. And SAP’s BI Accelerator does not persist data at this time.
In principle, the Netezza and DATAllegro stories are similar — take an established open source RDBMS*, build optimized hardware to run it, and optimize the software configuration as well. Much of the optimization is focused on getting data on and off disk sequentially, minimizing any random accesses. This is why I often refer to data warehouse appliances as being the best alternative to memory-centric data management. Beyond that, the optimizations by the two vendors differ considerably.
*Netezza uses PostgreSQL; DATAllegro uses Ingres.
Hmm. I don’t feel like writing more on this subject at this very moment, yet I want to post something urgently because there’s an IOU in my Computerworld column today for it. OK. More later.
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