UPDATED: Just nine months after Oracle first announced its Optimized Warehouse Initiative to help accelerate data warehouse deployments, Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) has introduced its entry into the market.
The HP BladeSystem for Oracle Optimized Warehouse Initiative (OOWI) will be available in July and comes in capacities of 1 terabyte (TB) to 4TB.
HP claims it’s 2.5 times faster than comparable offerings and consumes only 35 percent as much power.
Like similar products from other hardware vendors running OOWI, HP’s product will let enterprises install and set up data warehouses more quickly and easily.
“There’s been an emerging market for extremely high-performance databases, and you ideally want something that’s got very high input and output speeds, supports a very large memory and basically screams like a banshee,” Charles King, Pund-IT president and principal analyst, told InternetNews.com.
HP is the fourth vendor to come onboard with the OOWI program. The others are Dell (NASDAQ: DELL), Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) and IBM (NYSE: IBM).
“We put our Blade servers plus our Blade storage all on a C-7000 rack so you essentially end up with a data warehouse or a datamart in a box,” Rich Ghiossi, HP’s director of business intelligence, told InternetNews.com.
Each 1TB box has an Oracle database installed and tweaked,” Ghiossi explained. The database is configured to a generic data warehouse load so it’s ready out of the box.
Speed and power are critical in this arena, because OOWI is Oracle’s bid to meet the demand for high-performance databases, Pund-IT’s King said.
More such solutions will become available, because “as companies acquire more data and larger datasets,” he added. “They’re looking for ways to gain maximum business leverage out of that data.”
The first product in the OOWI line launched in September and consisted of Dell PowerEdge servers and EMC CLARiiON networked systems running an Oracle database.
Sun was next, unveiling the Oracle Database Enterprise Edition and Oracle Partitioning to run on its Fire E20K server, open source Solaris operating system, and StorageTek 6540 arrays.
The unit could handle up to 10TB of raw data.
IBM was third, unveiling the IBM System 3850 Intel-based box and IBM System Storage DS3400 solutions running an Oracle database, available in configurations of 1TB and 3TB, in December.
IBM has a separate blade, which runs with Red Hat Linux and is aimed at the SMB market.
*The OOWI program was launched “to help customers who don’t have the right kind of experience in building business intelligence data warehouses, and for customers who want to take the risk out of the project,” Willie Hardie, Oracle’s vice president of product marketing, told InternetNews.com.
“We give them an off-the-shelf solution that has everything you need — server capability, memory, connectivity, processing, the preinstalled database, and all they have to do is load the data and start running their queries.”
Hardie said additional announcements will come as other hardware vendors join the OOWI project.
*Updated to add comments from Oracle’s Willie Hardie
