News for December 12

TheRegister: Clouds mass over data warehousing

by Chris Mellor

Suddenly the data warehousing sector seems to be hotting up. There's EMC's new competency centre and now Kognitio's in-memory data warehouse which threatens to brush server vendors aside if the idea gets adopted big time. How does that one work?

The story goes like this: Cluster lots of servers together in a shared-nothing architecture and use parallelising data-warehouse SW - WX2 in this case - to treat them as a single but very parallel resource. The servers all execute different threads of queries against the data that is stored in the servers' DRAM as an in-memory database. All other data, such as query results or a fraction of the data warehouse that is not in memory, is stored on disk - the servers' directly-attached disk and not in a networked disk resource such as a SAN or a NAS box.

Generally, with a disk-based data warehouse, only a fraction of the data is stored in memory, and query results executed against this are only looking at a data sample and not the full warehouse. Results from a full-warehouse query are statistically much more likely to be correct.

Roger Gaskell, the chief technology officer of Kognitio, says the firm is currently bidding for a 40TB data warehouse and its bid is less expensive than the installed DW system based on storage arrays and many servers. But how can 40TB memory-based system be cheaper?

CNet: New solid-state drives still pack sticker shock

by Brooke Crothers

The newest solid-state drives are just starting to hit retail. But would you buy one?
Intel X25-M solid-state drive has received glowing reviews for its performance

Solid-state drives are attractive because they're generally faster than hard-disk drives, particularly at reading data-generally something PC users spend most of their time doing.

But price is still an obstacle, especially to the frugal consumer.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based OCZ Technology is now offering some of the most competitively priced solid-state drives based the high-speed Serial ATA (SATA) II interface.

OCZ Vertex SSD drives start at $129 for a 30GB SSD. Other capacities include a 120GB drive for $469 and a 250GB SSD for $869. Though $869 may seem pricey compared to a 7200RPM 250GB hard-disk drive that can retail for well under $100, it's relatively cheap for a large-capacity SSD. In the past, SanDisk had sold a 256GB drive through resellers that was priced, almost incredibly, at more than $15,000. Axiom had been selling 256GB solid-state drives priced above $6,000.

OCZ says the Vertex Series of SSDs have a 1.5 million-hour mean time before failure (MTBF), "ensuring peace of mind over the long term." Solid-state drives, since their inception, have been plagued by doubts about write durability. SSD manufacturers such as Intel, Micron Technology, and Samsung say long-term durability is no longer an issue.

InfoWorld: Cisco planning significant datacenter assault

by Jim Duffy

Cisco has a number of significant product introductions on tap for 2009 as the company continues to morph from a pure networking player into an overall IT supplier.

Expected next year are internally developed datacenter blade servers, energy efficiency improvements across Cisco's switching portfolio, and a new release of the company's unified communications software for intercompany collaboration.

The product launches are intended to buttress Cisco's strategy to become not just the leading network vendor to corporations and services providers, but to become the leading supplier of overall IT architectures to these constituents.

"The network will enable all forms of communication and IT," said Cisco CEO John Chambers during his keynote address at the company's annual C-Scape analyst conference here last week. "IT is not enabling our strategy, it is our strategy."

Perhaps the most important example of that will be a new Cisco blade server system expected next year. This will take the company into the datacenter compute space, right up against longtime stalwarts – and up to now, Cisco partners – IBM and HP.

Cisco officials interviewed at last week's C-Scape conference would neither confirm nor deny that this system is in development – its code name is "California Server," according to sources – but its impact will be substantial in the market and on its current relationships with compute partners.

"I've seen the product," says Vikram Mehta, CEO of Blade Network Technologies, a supplier of blade server switches to IBM, HP, Dell, and others. "I think I know what Cisco's trying to do. Servers are a $60 billion market. And if you're the size of Cisco – $40 billion – you're looking for the next multibillion dollar market to jump into. There aren't a lot of adjacent markets, so they decided to step on their partnerships and take these guys head-on to get a slice of the server action."