Sun and Greenplum unveil commercial open source data warehouse appliance

Corporate IT Update, July 28, 2006

CORPORATE IT UPDATE-(C)1995-2006 M2 COMMUNICATIONS LTD

Network solutions provider Sun Microsystems Inc (Nasdaq:SUNW) and Greenplum, a provider of enterprise PostgreSQL for business intelligence, have unveiled a data warehouse appliance built from open source software and general purpose systems.

According to the companies, the solution combines Sun's new "Thumper" Sun Fire X4500 data server powered by Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors with Greenplum's parallel distribution of PostgreSQL, Bizgres MPP, in a single appliance capable of scanning 1TB of data in 60 seconds and scalable to hundreds of terabytes of usable database capacity. It is powered by the Solaris 10 operating system and takes advantage of the Solaris ZFS 1.0 file system.

Benefits of the system are said to include: high performance, estimated at 10-50 times the performance of traditional data warehouse solutions; openness; low acquisition and ongoing administration costs estimated at less than USD20,000 per usable terabyte; and reliability and scalability.

The Data Warehouse Appliance will be available later in the third quarter. Initial configurations will deliver usable database capacities of 10, 40 and 100TB. Pricing for the 40TB and 100TB configurations begins at USD15,000 per usable terabyte, and pricing for the 10TB configuration starts at USD25,000 per usable terabyte, Sun said.

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