DATAllegro Grid Enabled Data Warehouse Appliance

Traditional enterprise data warehouse solutions require companies to either:

• Centralize their data warehouse - resulting in huge volumes of data incapable of being queried at high speeds.
• Host independent data marts - a number of low-cost, high-performance systems capable of meeting processing demands but failing to support centralised data governance.

A data warehouse appliance promised to resolve this dilemna by offering significant increases in processing power and equally significant decreases in costs. In many cases, these promises did not deliver in real world environments.

This lead to the introduction by DataAllegro of its grid-enabled DW appliances. Using a hub-and-spoke architecture, the grid provides the benefit of speed and performance of independent data marts, coupled with the data governance of a centralized data warehouse.

According to Philip Russom, Senior Manager with The Data Warehousing Institute [TDWI] "Grid enablement makes more data warehouse architectures and configurations feasible.... That’s because the grid can integrate multiple data warehouse appliances into distributed architectures based on hubs, federation, conformed dimensions and so on".

Although standard interfaces like ODBC provide the same solution, the grid integrates multiple appliances in the same high-speed infrastructure found within individual appliances. This means the entire architecture benefits from the same performance, reliability and low-maintenance characteristics of individual appliances.

Overall, grid has made distributed data warehouse architectures more feasible.

Platforms

DATAllegro v3 uses an all-commodity platform including:

• Dell™ servers
• EMC® storage
• Cisco switches

Grid innovation is differentiating DataAllegro from other major players such as Netezza and Teradata.

Uses

DATAllegro’s grid-enabled data warehouse appliances claim the ability to analyze historical data at a price as low as $8,000 per TB. Recent data that needs to be queried most often is kept on a high performance appliance.

DATAllegro’s grid-enabled technology also offers a good solution for disaster recovery, providing customers with immediate failover, with no hindrance to performance.

Integration with Teradata

In February 2008, DATAllegro launched a new set of utilities designed to allow companies to easily move data to and from Teradata data warehouses and to migrate applications from Teradata to DATAllegro.

This means companies can use DATAllegro and the utilities alongside their existing Teradata data warehouses in order to add capacity and/or increase performance at a very low cost.

They can also use them to replace a Teradata enterprise data warehouse (EDW) with DATAllegro.

Case Examples

A retail company is offloading Teradata data on a daily basis to a DATAllegro data warehouse appliance to analyze data across a number of stores.

A manufacturing company is migrating from Teradata to a grid of DATAllegro appliances.

The distinctions between DataAllegro and Teradata are:

Teradata architecture requires a very large data center footprint, resulting in very high costs. This makes it a best option for organisations with very large data volumes and/or very complex data

DATAllegro’s technology is a non-proprietary platform offering much higher performance per server – around 10 times that offered by Teradata. This makes DataAllegro a preferred option for medium-high volume data and for adding capacity to a Teradata DW at a very affordable price.

DATAllegro’s Teradata Utility Capabilities

• Convert BTEQ production jobs with the DATAllegro DASQL Batch client
• Convert DDL from Teradata to DATAllegro
• Connect to the Teradata environment and extract table structures [schema] and data and import them into DATAllegro

DATAllegro has offices throughout the US and in Europe. DATAllegro Website

Next: HP NeoView

Back To Top