Blog: Krish Krishnan

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Which Appliance fits your needs?

Wow!, take a deep breath, the data warehouse marketplace is getting inundated with all sorts of cool gadgets also called as Appliances or Accelerators (let us keep it there for now). What do these tools do for you? How different are they and how to identify their succint differences?.

If your primary goal is focussed on performance and scalability with cost coming as the last criteria(CFO's you pretend not to hear or read this line), then you can start buying all kinds of fancy appliances to suit all the different needs and keep adding complexity to the architecture of your solution. But rarely do you have a situation like this, on the contrary the focus is to reduce the TCO while improving the performance and scalability. Here is where you have to start choosing wisely on which group of appliances' do you need in the toolkit arsenal for the data warehouse and the business intelligence and analytical applications it serves.

Let us split this further, separate the requirements of performance and scalability into data management problem and data presentation problem. by doing this you will isolate the real issues into manageable components and we can start looking at what the marketplace can offer to satisfy those specific problems or requirements.

You have the data warehouse appliances like Netezza and Dataupia that will address the data management problem and can be a backplane to the data presentation problem. Then you have vendor offerings for speeding the business intelligence portions like Cognos Celequest, ParAccel which are accelerators for specific solution stacks. If you have invested in a tool like which is not supported by an accelerator, you could still add layers in the data management area to help speed up the presentation layer.

Bottom line is there are distinct differences between the different kinds of "appliances". Before you rush into POC or other decisions, we will need evaluate your requirements throughly. Determine the weakest link in your current state architecture, then decide the next steps.

In case you are wondering how to determine the first step of this game, a separate whitepaper on the topic titled 'how to determine whether your data warehouse requires an appliance' is in the works and will be available shortly.

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