DW infrastructure made easier

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Earlier this week we announced the availability of another DW appliance from HP called the HP Business Data Warehouse (BDW). Its the 3rd appliance we are making available from HP (HP Enterprise Data Warehouse and the HP Business Decision Appliance).

The BDW appliance is 4U in size and architected, pre-tuned and pre-configured to run a data warehouse workload for solutions aimed at 5TB databases or less. And by leveraging new features in SQL Server 2008 R2, we were able to optimize the appliance deployment experience. From plugging in and powering up to a running SQL Server takes a little over 10 minutes! (Installation time will vary based on customer’s environment).

The only external software requirement is for Active Directory and DHCP. Installation boils down to answering 4 main questions:

  • What do you want your Windows administration password to be?
  • What domain to join?
  • What account can I use to join the domain?
  • Which domain user should be made local Administrator?

High Level Specs

  • Dual Intel Westmere processors for a total of 12 cores
  • 96 GB of RAM
  • 24 hard drives
    • OS is on mirrored 300GB drives
    • 22 drives are 600GB, with 6 mirrored data LUNS, 4 drives configured for RAID10 for the logs files, a 3 drive RAID 5 staging area and 3 hot spares all providing full onboard redundancy.

For more information visit the HP Business Data Warehouse page on Microsoft.com. And be sure to check out the video below to get a glimpse of the new HP Business Data Warehouse appliance.