At the beginning of 2011 Microsoft and HP announced a partnership to create a portfolio of converged application appliances that fuse applications, infrastructure and productivity tools into a single system.
Three of the appliances that particularly stand out in our field are:
- Business Decision Appliance
- Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance
- Database Consolidation Appliance
The Business Decision and Data Warehouse Appliances have been available since that announcement, while the Database Consolidation Appliance was launched towards the end of 2011.
That was just over a year ago! (I know! Time flies, right?). Yet it was not until I was lucky enough to attend a couple of Microsoft hosted sessions on the Business Decision Appliance and Database Consolidation appliance towards the end of 2011, that I became aware of them.
I like to think my finger is somewhere near the pulse of the Industry’s beating heart, but Microsoft and HP’s appliance offerings flew under my radar – perhaps overshadowed by the hype created by SQL Server 2012?
Whatever the reason, the lack of jumping up and down from anyone disturbs me a little. These products need some attention, and as I hope you will discover, it is justified attention. I expect the imminent release of SQL Server 2012 and the UK Technical Launch at SQL Bits at the end of March is likely to highlight these appliances with a bit more vigour.
Business Decision Appliance
The BDA is simply described as Business Intelligence in a Box.
When you purchase the BDA you receive an HP Server, optimised and pre-configured to run Microsoft’s SQL Server 2008R2, SharePoint 2010 and PowerPivot as fast as could be humanly engineering by the gurus at Microsoft and HP.
You can then attach the server into your existing IT infrastructure. Turn it on and run through the configuration screens (Microsoft has a video showing it takes just over an hour to go through the setup instructions).
And that’s it. You’re done. Once the setup is complete you can begin to harness the benefits. Start* sharing, collaborating and analyzing your company data to make better decisions based on facts.
The more tech savvy out there will be thinking, “I could construct that myself!”, and you would be right. You could. Should your employers let you? No. At a cost of £12k-15k** you will be hard pressed to find a similar server specification for much less. Coupled with the fact that Microsoft and HP are essentially throwing in their optimisations for free, you just won’t get your system to run anywhere near as fast for the same price. Add the time to get it all working and you have already spent more money than if you had just purchased the Appliance.
What’s the catch?
Fundamentally, there isn’t one. It is a very good way to get started on Business Intelligence with low risk and fast ROI. The only snag I see at the moment is there is no upgrade path. The Appliance at the moment ships and works with SQL 2008R2 and Microsoft is telling us that the SQL2012 version will not be available until the fall of this year at the earliest. Remember, upgrading SQL Server on the appliance, which you could do, is likely to negate the performance optimisations - and you’ll lose support for it.
If you want to harness the new features of SQL Server 2012 within an appliance configuration, you will need to purchase a new appliance when it becomes available. All is not lost however; the physical server is yours to do as you wish and can be reassigned and used like any other server in your infrastructure.
Is the upgrade path a problem? I don’t think so. Most company’s IT departments are reluctant to touch new technologies until the first service pack is released anyway. The BDA solves a problem now and like most technology, if you wait for the next best thing, the next best thing after that will be around the corner. At some point you have to dive in. The question is, can you and your business afford to wait?
There’s a lot more information in this Whitepaper and by visiting Microsoft’s site for the appliance.
* You need Office 2010 to use PowerPivot.
**Software Licenses excluded.
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