What is a ‘BI Appliance’?
Database infrastructures have been in existence for more than half a century. They seem to have evolved over time due to increasing data volumes and the need to access this data faster while maintaining the sanity of cost of maintaining this infrastructure. Today, we live in an age where data is growing at a rapid pace…faster than ever. After the internet boom in later 1990s and early 2000s, the onset of mobile, social media and multitude of sensing technologies in mid to late 2000s has ensured that the data size which once used to be within control has now reached a growth acceleration which is almost impossible to tame. Unstructured data is growing more rapidly than the structured data that we know so well. Current estimates put the data created in the world at 2000 Exabytes by end of this year (1 Exabyte = 1000 Petabytes = 1 million Terabytes). In contrast, the amount of available storage is only at 1000 Exabytes, which is half of what is required to store and effectively use the data. This is truly the age of ‘Big Data’.
In the BI world, the challenge is not that of storage alone, but that of accessing this humongous data and be able to analyze it within a reasonable time. Also, traditionally the infrastructure also was sourced from different vendors for storage and database. Managing and maintaining these were a big headache and a considerable cost for enterprises. To solve this specific problem, we saw the arrival of ‘BI Appliances’.
Our White Paper entitled Evaluating and Implementing the ‘Right’ BI Appliance for your organization explains how to choose a BI Appliance that suits your organization? Similar to the process of procuring software, we have to ‘evaluate’ these appliances against a set of ‘selection criteria’. And yes….evaluation of a BI Appliance is an art and science by itself. If you can adopt the methodology prescribed in the whitepaper, you can be assured of a successful evaluation and implementation.
