The appliance is called IBM Balanced Configuration Unit (BCU) for Linux and bundles in DB2 Data Warehouse Edition and eServer 326m running on Linux with TotalStorage DS4800.
The combined system covers a range of data management capabilities including archiving, integration and analysis.
BCU is no lightweight appliance. It is architected around modular and addable nodes for upward scalability and performance. IBM says this makes it easy for companies to flexibly plan the capacity requirements of their data warehouse.
Customers can balance components to avoid purchasing unnecessary resources, said Karen Parrish, vice president of IBM’s BI solutions division. Because all BCU components have been pre-staged, pre-integrated, pre-tested and validated by a services team it can be rapidly implemented.
She also said that IBM said had consciously included commodity, open source components in BCU to offer fast, affordable and simple paths to enterprise data warehousing and BI
Our clients are increasingly evaluating Linux as the foundation for their fast growing and high performance data warehouse platforms.
Specialized data appliances are now being touted by vendors like Netezza Corp and Datallegro Inc as a solution for the ills of expensive enterprise data warehousing – particularly in terms of implementation cost and handling complex analytic queries. These appliances bundle pre-integrated hardware, database software (open source), and storage components that are optimized for rapid querying and retrieval of data.
Originally positioned as a low-cost, quick to implement departmental data mart solutions, appliances now have larger data warehousing environments in their sights and have expanded both their storage capacities and their marketing rhetoric putting them head-to-head with incumbents like IBM, Oracle Corp and NCR Teradata Corp.
IBM debuted its first pSeries eServer BCU appliance product last summer to counter this threat.
