Poster session: Simplifying business intelligence with a hybrid appliance: the IBM balanced warehouse

Business Intelligence systems require a complex configuration of robust components, including analytical and warehousing software, database systems, servers, and storage. These systems are consistently at the frontier of the most complex query reporting and analysis engines over very large data sets. As a result such systems typically present significant administrative challenges and therefore require simplified deployment and administration. A key consideration is the balance between system resources, which if poorly configured can easily waste time and money. Two fundamental strategies have been used in the past to architect database systems for these environments: traditional relational database servers, with their concomitant configuration and design flexibility and complexity, and data warehouse appliances at the other extreme, with their superb ease of use but well known limitations in flexibility, range of workload, access plan selection and concurrency. We introduce a hybrid approach known as the IBMreg Balanced Warehousetrade for data warehousing, which exploits the best attributes of both strategies to achieve a scalable, high performance and easy to deploy data warehouse building block with the best self managing attributes and reduced administrative requirements. Initial versions of this technology have been deployed with success by several customers.