Microsoft ships the first technology preview for Project code-named “Madison”
Microsoft’s technology preview of Project “Madison,” Microsoft’s new massively scalable data warehousing solution, is now available to select customers and the feedback we’ve received from participating customers to date has been excellent. Ten customers from 7 industries are already participating in Madison’s first technology preview, and these early adopters are delighted with initial performance results. Participants are loading data at rates of 1 TB per hour and processing query executions at over 1.5 TB per minute. Microsoft has successfully ported DATAllegro’s MPP data warehouse onto SQL Server 2008 with Windows Server 2008 as the operating system, enabling queries to run up to 5 times faster on the new port.
According to Ron Van Zanten, directing officer of business intelligence, Premier Bankcard LLC, “Upgrading to SQL Server 2008 has improved the performance of our data warehouse significantly. With more than 20 terabytes of data and growing, we are ready to take our data warehouse to the next level. In our current evaluation of Madison we’re very impressed with the efficiency and raw power of the appliance and how it can really process many terabytes of data seamlessly.” Appliances ranging from 8 nodes to 20 nodes are now ready to host customers for early evaluation.
Madison is a highly scalable data warehouse appliance that offers customers high performance at low cost through a massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture for SQL Server. Unlike its competitors, Madison offers hardware flexibility with configurations from the major hardware vendors and low cost through industry standard hardware. Project Madison extends Microsoft investments in data warehousing and allows SQL Server data warehouses to scale out, from fewer than 50 gigabytes to over a petabyte of data.
Key customer benefits in the technology preview of “Madison” include:
· Data warehouse scalability into the petabyte range
· Low cost of ownership through industry standard hardware
· Appliance model that simplifies data warehouse deployment and maintenance
· Integrates with existing SQL Server 2008 data warehouses via a unique hub-and-spoke architecture
Customers participating in the first Madison technology preview are required to meet specific criteria for installation and as such, the initial preview is limited. Madison availability is currently planned for the first half of calendar year 2010. For more information on registration for Madison technology previews, email mdsontap@microsoft.com
http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/default.aspx
