Sun, Greenplum Create Opteron-Based BI Appliance

Published: July 27, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server maker Sun Microsystems and upstart data warehousing software supplier Greenplum announced this week that they are working together to create what amounts to a data warehousing appliance. This appliance marries Sun's new "Thumper" Opteron-based X4500 data servers and Greenplum's Bizgres MPP, a massively parallel implementation of the open source PostgreSQL database.

The DW Appliance runs Sun's Solaris 10 operating system, which is also open source and which, as of the latest update, includes an integrated PostgreSQL database and a support option for it through Sun. The Thumper array also uses Sun's Zettabyte File System, and so does the DW Appliance. The feeds and speeds of the DW Appliance are a bit vague, but the two are promising a "two orders of magnitude" better price/performance over the competition (who was unnamed), with the lowest cost in the market of "less than $20,000 per usable terabyte." Sun and Greenplum said the DW Appliance can scan 1 TB of data in 60 seconds, and that with high-speed interconnect and the massively parallel extensions that Greenplum is bringing to bear with the Bizgres project, which it calls Scale Everything, it can cluster multiple machines together to handle even larger data warehousing workloads.

Sun just announced the Thumper machine, which it calls a data server because it is somewhere between a server and a storage array, a few weeks ago. It is essentially a revamped version of the X4100 two-socket "Galaxy" server that launched last September, but this one has been souped up with six eight-port SATA disk controllers on the board. By having so many SATA ports, the Thumper array can house up to 48 3.5-inch SATA disk drives as well as two dual-core Opteron 285 processors, which run at 2.6 GHz, into a 4U form factor. The Thumper server supports 250 GB or 500 GB SATA drives, so it can support a maximum of 24 TB of data. Sun said that it was intended to process data as well as store it, which is what it means by data server, and the Greenplum Bizgres software is exactly the kind of software Thumper was created to support.

A fully loaded Thumper with 24 TB of capacity and two Opterons costs $69,995; with 12 TB of storage using 250 GB drives, it costs $32,995. Greenplum is selling the DW Appliance in three configurations, with 10 TB, 40 TB, and 100 TB of data warehouse capacity. The 10 TB configuration costs $25,000 per usable terabyte (which seems like a strange way to say it costs $250,000), while pricing for the 40 TB and 100 TB configurations cost $15,000 per usable terabyte. The bigger the cluster of DW Appliances, the cheaper the software.