This week Microsoft announced the first step in its Project Madison strategy by releasing reference architectures through its SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse. Hardware vendors HP, Dell and Bull are all in on the action providing a one stop shopping approach to buying hardware for your multi-terabyte Data Warehouse.
When buying hardware for large databases there are usually many unknowns that need to be verified and tested before committing to a purchase. Many times you are at the whim of the hardware vendor’s sales rep and a proof-of-concept will go a long way to arriving at a costly decision. But that all takes extra time. What Microsoft has done here is to provide three major hardware vendors with tried-and-tested specifications that can be purchased with SQL Server 2008 to support large database implementations out-of-the-box. At a cost of as little as $13,000 per terabyte, these solutions give a plug-and-play approach to Data Warehouse architectures.
Microsoft’s long term strategy is to support large databases in the 100’s of terabytes and even into Petabytes. This is only possible with a scalable hardware solution. The acquisition of DATAllegro in July 2008 means Microsoft will provide massively parallel processing (MPP) appliances on top of multiple SQL Server instances in conjunction with these types of reference architectures. This is the future of distributed databases with “shared nothing” technologies that allow instant scalability.
So this is the first step in the long road of competition with the big guys IBM and Oracle. And as always, Microsoft’s product will be cheaper and easier to use. That’s good news for us as consumers (and DBAs…)
Cheers
Brian
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