HP and Microsoft Announce New Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing Appliances

Today, Microsoft and HP announced the availability of five new converged appliances—the HP Business Decision Appliance, the HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance, the HP Business Data Warehouse Appliance, the HP Database Consolidation Appliance, and HP e5000 Messaging System for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. “What we are doing with these new appliances is offering an all-in-one solution that includes hardware and software preinstalled and preconfigured for customers to deploy new solutions specifically for BI, for data warehousing, and for database consolidation,” said Fausto Ibarra, senior director, Microsoft Business Intelligence. Yesterday, SQL Server Magazine Senior Technical Director Michael Otey and I spoke with Ibarra and Steve Tramack, senior engineering manager at HP, about the new appliances and their benefits.

HP Business Decision Appliance—This appliance, which is available now, can handle up to 150 concurrent users and provides customers with a fast way to implement business intelligence in their environments. “With the appliance, we’ve really dramatically shortened the time it takes to deploy a BI solution,” said Ibarra.

“Our customers, they're seeing reduced risk and TCO because of the reduced complexity involved with deploying this [appliance], and much faster time to business value,” said Tramack. “Some customers deploying these kinds of solutions in the past have seen it take weeks, or even months, to successfully deploy this type of solution. With our joint effort, we’re now seeing a customer being able to stand up this environment, the entire infrastructure, and be ready to start integrating data sources and achieving business value in a matter of hours.”

“It really is the industry’s first self-service business intelligence appliance,” said Ibarra. “It includes SQL Server, SharePoint, and PowerPivot. Companies ranging from mid-market all the way up to enterprise can use it to offer the capability to their end users to do self-service business intelligence, and enable IT to maintain oversight over those BI solutions that are created by end users, who can then share those solutions with other users using SharePoint and collaborate with other users.”

HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance—This appliance, which was announced in November and is available today, is optimized for SQL Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2’s Parallel Data Warehouse Edition. It allows databases to grow to more than 500TB, said Ibarra.

HP Business Data Warehouse Appliance—This appliance, which should be available in June, is targeted at smaller data warehouse installations and data marts and complements the HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance.

HP Database Consolidation Appliance—“Over the last few years, one of the biggest trends in the industry has been to consolidate databases,” said Ibarra. “Server consolidation, virtualization—every customer I talk to is having some kind of initiative to try to streamline their infrastructure.”

“So with the Database Consolidation Appliance, which will be available in H2, we are basically enabling our customers to consolidate hundreds or thousands of databases. It has built-in capabilities for high availability and disaster recovery based on technology from Microsoft and HP, preconfigured, so that literally you can deploy the appliance and start consolidating databases very quickly.”

HP e5000 Messaging System for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010—This appliance, which is available in March, is a pre-configured Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 platform. It provides large mailboxes at a low cost and is scalable.

You can find out more about these appliances on the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Appliances page.

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