Blog: Krish Krishnan

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Data Warehouse with a "Google" like scalability

AsterData a company based out of the Bay area, announced their "go live" and the availability of the first platform release of their flagship product Aster nCluster. The area of computing that Aster solves in their approach to data warehousing architecture is "network optimization", which is their differentiator in the marketplace.

What is interesting here is the fact that in their announcement this week, we see two customers who have large implementations - MySpace.com is running a 100TB data warehouse on Aster nCluster. In conversations with the CEO of Aster Mayank Bawa, he mentioned that in the past two weeks, an upgrade was performed on this 100TB data warehouse by Aster and the entire process was glitch free, you can read more at www.asterdata.com

In my perspective there are several ways to scale a data warehouse architecture. Aster has selected the first approach to be network optimization. Another interesting fact that piqued my interest is the "Google" like scalability that Aster promises to bring to the marketplace. Their website has a few interesting notes on their architecture and the CEO and CTO have presented compelling arguments on how they can achieve this scalability. While it is to early to predict anything, it is certainly exciting to see more offerings in the market to address the ever growing and demanding DW/BI market.

In the same breath, it is also interesting to see that the current vendors have started coming out with the next releases of their product, which focuses on scalability from a different angle and provides another compelling reason to look and compare.

As always, you will need to evaluate your needs and see whose architecture suits your problem. I'am currently working on a methodology for selecting and evaluating DW Appliances, if interested, drop an email.

Have a great memorial day weekend !!!

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