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Greenplum: EMC's Latest Plum?: Page 3 of 4

However, usage has expanded to other individual contributors who do not manage people but need to manage information to do their job better. For example, gauging the success of retail uplift activities like price discounts, coupons, advertising across hundreds of stores, and designing effective sales and marketing campaigns involves a lot of people and a lot of work. When effective data usage expands to a couple of thousand people, it's easy to understand how mushrooming growth is a key reason as to why EMC viewed its entry into such a key and growing market as a must.

Data warehousing is not an IT infrastructure business as usual. Although it uses storage, servers, and networking hardware, as is true with all of IT, the requirements are different. For example, on the storage side traditional OLTP applications are all about IOPS, whereas data warehousing is about storage bandwidth. OLTP applications do a lot of random reads and writes of data. Analytic-based SQL queries, on the other hand may require sequential or "clustered" reads that span a large part of an entire petabyte-scale warehouse.

Bottom line; how fast information can be pushed out to the computing engines i.e., storage bandwidth and not how fast it can be "crunched" is a critical factor in data warehousing. Interestingly, even though SATA hard drives have slower rotational speeds than FC or SAS drives, their areal density is greater allowing more data to be stored in the same two dimensional space which means that, in at least some cases, more data can be pushed out per second via SATA solutions than with FC or SAS technologies.

That said, computing speed is also important. In the largest queries, the computing engine often becomes a bottleneck because it can't read the data flooding in from storage fast enough. Greenplum use of massively parallel processing (MPP) technologies which leverages virtualized industry standard components to scale systems up and down to match workload requirements, can help IT keep up with highly variable data flows.

But that is not the only necessary difference between Greenplum and other technologies. Database management systems were originally built for write-intensive OLTP applications. Data warehousing in these environments is a retrofit that requires a substantially different focus. In contrast, EMC recently announced Greenplum Database 4.0, the latest edition of this enterprise-oriented product which is specifically optimized for next-gen data warehousing and analytics - which includes the ability to analyze ALL of an organization's structured and unstructured data.