Microsoft and Dell Team Up on Business Intelligence

Published: September 26, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft and Dell have teamed up to sell Microsoft's business intelligence applications loaded on Dell servers, the vendors announced last week. As part of the work, the vendors have developed reference configurations for three data warehouses, ranging from 1 TB to 4 TB in size.

Dell and Microsoft have long been partners for enterprise customers. Recently, the two tech giants have come together to determine the optimal setups for running compute-intensive BI and DW workloads, such as online analytical processing (OLAP) and its siblings, relational OLAP (ROLAP), multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP) and hybrid relational (or two-dimensional) and multidimensional (HOLAP).

Because the performance of BI applications can be disappointing if too little forethought is put into designing them, Dell and Microsoft have done the grunt work of testing the various configurations, and coming up with the setups that give the most bang for the buck.

What they came up with were three reference configurations that will provide good performance for a 1 TB data warehouse, a 2 TB data warehouse, and a 4 TB data warehouse. In each case, the companies recommend a three-tier setup that separates the database server, the analysis server, and the reporting server.

The companies recommend the database server be a Dell PowerEdge 6950 equipped with four dual-core AMD Opteron processors, 64 GB of internal memory, about 300 GB of internal storage, two external disk controllers, and two external PowerEdge MD 1000 disk arrays loaded with 30, 73 GB, 10,000 RPM SAS drives protected with RAID. The companies recommended the analysis server also be a four-way PowerEdge 6950, but with only 14 GB of memory, and with only a single external array spinning 15 disk. The reporting server is a two-way Dell PowerEdge 2970 equipped with two dual-core Opteron processors and 24 GB of memory.

Residing on three components are Windows Server 2003 Enterprise X64 Edition and SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition. Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) and Dell's own internal monitoring software are also part of the reference configurations. The configurations are also able to handle PerformancePoint Server 2007, which Microsoft released to manufacturing last week.

The specific configurations were tested and rated for their capability to perform day-to-day tasks, such as sustaining input from 250 users, indexing large files, and backing up the database. Organizations adopting the vendors' recommendations can save upward of $300,000 per TB in their data warehouses, the vendors claim.

For more information on joint Dell-Microsoft BI solutions, including a 25-page white paper detailing the setups, see this Dell Web page.

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