Ingres launches Icebreaker BI Appliance
By Peter Sayer
,
IDG News Service
, 08/22/2007
- Share/Email
- Tweet This
- Print
Ingres Corp. has released Icebreaker BI Appliance, a package of software integrating JasperSoft's open-source business-intelligence
suite with the Ingres 2006 database running on Rpath Linux.
The software costs US$45,000 a year for license to run it on two processors. Ingres counts a processor as a chip occupying
one socket, regardless of the number of cores it has, said Deb Woods, vice president of product management at Ingres.
That configuration could handle a file system of up to 2T bytes, making it suitable for small businesses or for larger ones
using it as a departmental server, Woods said.
Ingres already uses the Icebreaker name for a combination of its database and Rpath Linux. Rpath offers a stable Linux distribution
and a tool, rBuilder, for packaging applications with it as installable ISO disc images.
Although the Icebreaker BI Appliance package includes no hardware, Ingres calls it an appliance because all the components
of the software stack are tightly integrated and because the company supports all the software itself.
Ingres has trained staff to handle first- and second-line support, and plans to liaise with JasperSoft if more complex issues
arise, Woods said. Clients will deal only with Ingres, she said.
The company supports its products, in English only for now, from centers in Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. Staff in France
and Germany can deal with questions in the local language, but the software itself has not been localized, she said.
By offering the software as a disc image rather bundling it with hardware, Ingres allows customers to save space in their
data centers by running it in a virtualization environment on a larger server, Woods said. "You can partition the box and
have a lot more flexibility. If you had a box with four or eight sockets, you would only have to pay for the sockets you ran
it on."
Customer demand could change that strategy. "We are ready if they want to purchase it with hardware," she said. The company
has tested it on hardware from IBM Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Dell Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc.
There are no plans to provide an appliance based on Solaris, Woods said, as there is no equivalent of Rpath's rBuilder tool
for that platform.
The company has tested the appliance with systems integrators including India's Wipro Ltd., which announced in March that
it was setting up a team of developers to work with Ingres. It now uses the software stack to power an outsourced performance
management service for its customers.
Another Indian company, Satyam Computer Services Ltd., offers to install the appliance for customers looking for a low-cost
BI system, Ingres said.
Ingres had planned to announce Icebreaker BI Appliance in July, but decided to hold on until partners like Wipro and Satyam
were ready to offer services and applications built on top of it, Woods said.
The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.
Partner Content
www.bmc.com
Gartner 2009 Magic Quadrant for Job Scheduling
Gartner has positioned BMC CONTROL-M in the Leaders Quadrant of their "2009 Magic Quadrant for Job Scheduling." The report assesses the ability to execute and completeness of vision of key vendors in the marketplace. Read a full copy today, courtesy of BMC Software.
Download whitepaper
Dell's SMART Approach to Workload Automation
Read a compelling case study by EMA, Inc. to learn how Dell uses BMC CONTROL-M to cut cost and increase productivity with workload automation.
Download whitepaper
Workload Automation Cost Savings 2 Minute Video
A major computer manufacturer uses BMC CONTROL-M and just four people to schedule and run over 85,000 jobs every month. By switching to BMC CONTROL-M, they more than quadrupled the workload without adding a single staff member. See how in this 2-minute video overview.
Go to video
Comment