Sun Microsystems and Sybase have jointly issued an Enterprise Data
Warehouse Reference Architecture (EDWRA), in a quest to lower the
cost and to reduce the risk associated with enterprise data
warehousing.
The EDWRA guidelines, announced last week, apply to data warehouses
ranging in capacity from 100GBytes to 50TBytes, according to Ravi
Pendekanti, Sun's solutions marketing director.
Data warehousing gives companies the freedom to examine network
scenarios and test certain queries on a set of data copied from the
stored data within the network.
The EDWRA models built from Sun hardware and software and Sybase
database software tools gives the reference architecture an
advantage over mere cross-vendor product certifications, said Guy
Creese, a research director at Aberdeen Group.
"The reference design means that Sun and Sybase have actually sat
down and run this thing. In that sense, it should give customers a
bigger warm and fuzzy feeling than just taking certified products
off the shelf," Creese said. "Often the individual products are
certified. But you never always know whether this product was
tested with that product."
A blend of technology from both Sun and Sybase encompassing data
compression and file indexing gives EDWRA added appeal to storage
administrators, Pendekanti said. With a compression ratio of 0.46,
storing 48.2TBytes of data in a EDWRA data warehouse requires only
22TBytes of disc storage, he said. Unlike other forms of
compression, such as MP3, no bits of data are lost in EDWRA
compression, Pendekanti said.
Keeping data warehouse projects off the shoulders of the network
infrastructure is another reason for enterprises to consider EDWRA,
Creese said. "If you had the money and were willing to take the
risk, you could certainly do this kind of analysis with the data
that's in the operational systems," he added.