HP Adds BI Appliances
Hewlett-Packard Co. is beefing up its analytics portfolio, targeting mid-range and large-scale implementations with several new BI appliances.
The company today added the appliances to its newly named AppSystem portfolio during its HP Discover conference, taking place this week in Las Vegas.
The new Business Data Warehouse appliance is optimized for Microsoft's SQL Server. It follows the release in January of the Enterprise Data Warehouse, both of which were co-engineered by Microsoft and HP. The two companies inked a $250 million pact to co-develop converged appliances based on Microsoft's core software back in January of 2010 (see "Microsoft and HP: Eyeing Their Next Move").
The Enterprise Data Warehouse was targeted at larger enterprises with large data sets to enable them to consolidate those down into a large enterprise data warehouse. The new Business Data Warehouse is aimed at smaller and mid-range customers with data volumes up to 5 or 6 terabytes, according to HP.
"The goal is to make it really simple to consolidate data into a single data warehouse, pre-designed, pre-optimized single SKU, easy-to-deploy plug-it-in, and type in a few key things and you're off to the races, in hours versus potentially weeks or months," said Martin Whittaker, vice president of systems and solutions engineering for HP's Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking business.
Another system HP is announcing in conjunction with Microsoft is the HP Database Consolidation solution, or DBC, which is designed to bring together spread-out instances of SQL Server. "The sprawl of SQL Server instances consuming datacenter space, consuming power, lots of instances to manage, may be rather aged," Whittaker said.
DBC is pre-integrated with tools developed jointly by HP and Microsoft that are designed to simplify the migration of data from multiple older instantiations onto the database consolidation appliance. That reduces the footprint in the datacenter, including power and cooling, making it easier to manage, he said.
The company also rolled out the HP Vertica Analytics System, aimed at organizations looking to crunch massive amounts of data in real time. HP recently acquired Vertica and is now offering the software on the HP BladeSystem platform. The system will be offered in three configurations: quarter-, half- and full-rack. Whittaker said the full-rack configuration will manage a petabyte of data.
HP also announced the HP SAP Hana AppSystem, an appliance designed to perform analysis of data running in the SAP Business Suite.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on June 06, 2011