Blog: Krish Krishnan

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Data Warehouse Appliances - Friend or Foe

We have been seeing a buzz of activity in the Data Warehouse Appliance space. New vendor announcements, awards, analyst reviews, blogs and the list goes on. One key perspective to ponder about is whether this technology is your friend or foe?.

In my perspective the Data Warehouse Appliance is your "friend". Not just that they are inexpensive compared to traditional solutions, not that they make your CFO happy when talking budgets for infrastructure. The entire solution offering from any of the vendors focus on providing holistic solutions, not just a technology stack. How to use them and leverage them is another subject area, but the efforts by these vendors to build a cool stack of integrated technologies that can me managed from one platform and are highly effective and scalable, are key factors that motivate the categorization of the Appliance as your "friend".

When you implement the Appliance, there will be initial learning curves, pain points and frustations. But the key difference is all of the vendors will be eager to partner with you to provide the support to help the pain seem tolerable. You cannot get that attention from the traditional vendors until you are a big name company or you are in a multi year and multi million dollar deal in services with them and/or their partners. This is another key aspect that definitely scores big for the Appliance.

Another key aspect of the Appliance is its flexibility, while primarily geared as a Data Warehouse solution, this can be a platform for high speed applications and there are companies out there that have adopted this platform for that very purpose.

In conclusion, I can assure you that the Data Warehouse Appliance definitely is your friend.

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