QA: Pair Appliances and Virtualization to Beef Up Performance
Data warehouse appliances and virtualization make logical partners for companies interested in cost-effective solutions to handling massive amounts of data across devices.
Despite the continuing slow economy, demand for data warehouse appliances is growing. Businesses taking advantage of the benefits of this hardware range from a huge worldwide convenience foods business to a baseball league. Data virtualization can act as a strong partner to appliances, providing a single view of information across multiple appliances. Data virtualization is also useful because it provides a stable reporting layer during normal migration exercises, such as when additional data warehouse appliances are added to the information infrastructure.
In this interview, Robert Eve, executive vice president of marketing for Composite Software, Inc., an independent provider of data virtualization software, talks about the growth of data warehouse appliances and data virtualization. He also suggests critical considerations for companies that want to introduce appliances and data virtualization into the enterprise.
BI This Week: Why is demand for data warehouse appliances currently accelerating?
Robert Eve: At a macro level, it’s the confluence of three primary drivers. The first is the well-reported information explosion, and the technical challenges involved in making this information accessible in forms that business decision-makers can easily use. Second, costs per terabyte and for support are coming down, making data warehouse appliances more affordable and therefore more appealing. Finally, recent advancements in analytics technology, particularly in predictive analytics, promise to help make sense of the massive data volumes we’ve been talking about.
As data warehouse appliances continue to advance in functionality, they support the nascent predictive analytics technology, further enhancing their attractiveness as a strategic component to the enterprise information architecture.
What are some examples of the business impact of data warehouse appliances?
