Appliance Power: Crunching Data Warehousing Workloads Faster And Cheaper Than Ever

Appliances are taking up permanent residence in the heart of the enterprise data center — the data warehouse (DW). DW appliances — in all their bewildering proliferation — are moving into the mainstream. The reason? They are preconfigured, modular devices that support quick deployment for DW killer applications — most notably, accelerating online analytical processing (OLAP) queries against large, multidimensional data sets. DW appliances prepackage and pre-optimize the processing, storage, and software components for fast OLAP and fast data loading. Information managers should now factor DW appliances into data center deployments. But don't forget the basics, and use the same core criteria to evaluate DW appliances as for equivalent DW software, including price-performance, functionality, flexibility, scalability, manageability, integration, and extensibility.