Microsoft to Buy DATAllegro for Data Warehouse Appliances

Published: August 6, 2008

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft announced plans recently to buy DATAllegro, a Southern California company that develops Linux-based data warehousing appliances that can scale into the hundred-terabyte range. The software giant plans to create a version of DATAllegro's appliance that works with SQL Server 2008.

DATAllegro got its start earlier this decade as a sort of "plug-and-play" replacement for Oracle data warehouses. The company claimed that its combination of off-the-shelf components, an Ingres-based database (running on Linux), and its patent-pending acceleration techniques could speed the performance of queries by a factor of 10 compared to the price of an Oracle platform upgrade, which would provide only marginal improvement.

While DATAllegro doesn't currently support SQL Server or Windows, that didn't stop Microsoft from pursuing the company, which reportedly has some of the largest massively parallel processing (MPP) data warehousing implementations in the world. By comparison, traditional Oracle and DB2 data warehouses are often built on large symmetric multi-processor (SMP) architectures.

Microsoft says that, unlike most data warehouse appliance vendors targeting the one- to 25-terabyte range, DATAllegro patent-pending technology allows it to build data warehouses out of commodity components that can store hundreds of terabytes on a single system. "The addition of the DATAllegro team and its technology will take our data platform to the highest scale of data warehousing," says Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of the Data and Storage Platform Division at Microsoft.

DATAllegro partners with Dell and Bull for quad-core Xeon servers, EMC for CX3 and Clariion storage arrays, and Cisco for InfiniBand network storage adapters.

As commodity hardware narrows the gap with proprietary SMP architectures like IBM POWER, the MPP architecture is expected to gain steam. Indeed, Microsoft claims that, once DATAllegro adopts SQL Server and Windows, Microsoft will be able to out-scale even Oracle, and claim supremacy in the race to build the largest data warehouses. Obviously, this hasn't happened yet, but the fact that Microsoft has taken DATAllegro out of play increases its chances of making advances in the scale-up battle.

Terms of the deal were not announced. Microsoft says most of DATAllegro's team will stay in place at its headquarters in Aliso Viejo, which will become a Microsoft "center of excellence" for data warehousing.