Saving a Fortune in Data Warehousing

UPDATE at bottom.

I just wanted to extend my congratulations to the team at Greenplum, and our joint customers at Fox Interactive Media - the folks behind MySpace, Photobucket, IGN, FOXSports.com, and a whole series of web properties that together represent one of the single largest audiences on the web.

All three of us announced today that Fox is running a massive production data warehouse built atop Greenplum's data warehousing software on Sun's Solaris/ZFS based OpenStorage platforms (a sea of Thumpers, to be specific). That is to say, open source software is at the core of one of the world's largest - and most affordable - data warehouses.

Fox joins a series of joint Sun/Greenplum customers, from LinkedIn to the New York Stock Exchange, in looking to open source databases and innovation as a vehicle to drive better insight, faster decisions and more efficiency.

Which is to say, customers that are tired of proprietary vendors with a knack for raising license fees during economic downturns have a clear set of remarkably affordable alternatives. Based on commodity economics everyone can understand.

Congratulations to all involved!

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UPDATE: I've gotten a fair number of inquiries from folks wanting to know how the Greenplum/Thumper data warehouse discussed above prices out against its competitors - given that one recently announced proprietary entrant has suggested $15,000 per terabyte is acceptable to customers. My view is that's a pre-bubble price, and roughly an order of magnitude too expensive in today's market - and unlikely to garner more than headlines. But that's obviously a biased view, I'd check with a few customers to find out what they want to pay.

Posted on 11:59PM Sep 24, 2008 | Comments[27]

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