SGI Pushes Into Data Warehousing with Linux Supers and Oracle

Published: June 17, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

For the most part, supercomputing these days means taking a bunch of gear aimed at high-end commercial computing and tweaking it and clustering it together and then making it run parallel Fortran, Java, or C++ applications that model the weather, a nuclear explosion, or the chassis of a car. But, what is good for supercomputers is often good for cluster-friendly databases, and that is why Silicon Graphics is taking a run at the data warehousing space.

Specifically, SGI is partnering with database maker Oracle to create data warehouses that run on its Linux-based Altix supercomputers. The solution that the two companies have come up with is called the Adaptive Data Warehouse, and it combines Altix servers, SGI's InfiniteStorage disk arrays, and the Oracle database with the Real Application Clusters (RAC) clustered database extensions.

SGI is offering three different configurations of the data warehousing setup. The midrange configuration uses the company's Altix XE250 servers (which are two-socket Xeon boxes), InfiniteStorage 220 arrays (midrange SAN arrays), and an InfiniBand switch interconnect that is capable of supporting a data warehouse that is up to 20 TB in size. The large data warehouse offering spans up to 100 TB, and is based on Altix 450 servers (Itanium-based machines that use SGI's NUMAflex shared memory architecture), the InfiniteStorage 220 arrays. The big boy data warehouse, the so-called ultra-large setup, is based on the Itanium-based Altix 4700 servers and the high-end InfiniteStorage 4600 arrays. Both boxes pack a lot of bandwidth, and this can scale well beyond 100 TB for hefty data warehouses.

SGI is not the only one partnering with Oracle, of course, to offer what amounts to preconfigured setups for running data warehouses. Dell and EMC have tag-teamed to offer similar data warehouse setups on clusters, and IBM and Sun Microsystems are also partners in the Oracle Optimized Warehouse Initiative, which the SGI product was developed under.

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