Data Wave

  Business Intelligence   Strategy  

If you're an avid follower of hardware and CPU trends, you've undoubtedly seen that there is no let up in Moore's law. Individual CPU clock speeds exceed 3GHZ now, and Intel and AMD have figured out how to temporarily get around CPU-related heat issues by introducing dual-core processors which put multiple--albeit slightly less powerful--processors on a single chip.

The cost has also continued to spiral downward as x86 chip makers and OEMs embrace primarily Intel-based commodity servers and allow the benefits from manufacturing economies of scale to take effect. Net-net, processors keep getting faster and servers keep getting cheaper. While the data warehousing world has gone along its merry way with its traditionally proprietary solutions such as Teradata, IBM RISC and HP Superdome, the rest of the world has been catching the wave of commodity Intel servers and clustering them to build enterprise class solutions.

Intel or AMD based serves running LINUX that are clustered together today match up well in performance against big iron RISC or MVS based solutions. And in terms of price, they knock the big iron boxes out of the park. It's time for the data warehousing industry to take note and start seriously looking at Intel or AMD server solutions to support the data warehousing environment.

While the skeptics were probably right about the …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.