Data Warehouse Solutions

Data warehouse solutions range from the basic data warehouse and consolidated warehouses to active data warehouses and data warehouse appliances. Not only is processing power increasing, vendors are introducing innovation to decrease the carbon footprint of DW infrastructures.

Basic Warehouse Soulutions

A basic warehouse operates solely as a data store. Subsets of data required for analysis are offloaded into data marts, to allow for faster processiong. This solution is adequate for lower volumes of data, and less complex data.

Data Warehouse Bundles

DW bundles offer two key advantages:

• Tuned for warehousing
• Fast, preintegrated queries - but not to the degree of a true appliance.

DW bundles are offerred by:

• IBM - DB2 Integrated Cluster Environment [ICE] for Linux
• Sun - Sybase iForce Solutions
• Unisys - ES7000 Business Intelligence Solutions

Consolidated Warehouses

Consolidated warehouses are used for storage and processing of larger volumes of data. Building a terascale consolidated data warehouse requires:

1. Construction of a large network of high-end servers
2. Integration of terascale storage systems.
3. Development of RDBMS software that can analyze millions or billions of CDRs.

These are costly projects that require large development and maintenance teams. As data volume grows, along with increasing complexity of historical, pattern-analysis queries and growth in the user community, many warehouses are unable to keep up with business demand.

Active Data Warehouses

Active data warehouses, such as Teradata, use massively parallel processing and shared nothing architecture to provide massive processing power. Data can be mined and queried directly on the data warehouse, without impacting transactional activity. Data marts are not required, adding the advantage of reducing the number of data locations.

• Teradata - Teradata 12.0 with Active Data Warehouse Technology

Data Warehouse Appliances

Using a data warehouse appliance, such as Netezza solves the terascale data warehouse challenge without compromising on performance, supporting complex BI queries against billions of CDRs within minutes or seconds, versus hours or days.

A fully-integrated data warehouse appliance consists of:

• A host computer
• Arrays of hot-swappable mirrored storage
• Custom chips and network switches that act as a powerful unit to manage data flows and process queries at the disk level.

Using Massively Parallel Processing architecture, systems such as Teradata ADW or Netessa NPS are specifically designed for high performance and scalability. Their performance capability dramatically reduces the latency of complex BI analysis, with data continuously loaded even during query performance. This means data is always completely current.

DW Platforms

MS Windows Server 2008

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