Benefits of Warehouse Virtualization

By cwardell • March 18th, 2009

I enjoyed participating as a panel member in today’s webinar about virtualizing the data warehouse with VMware and Vertica. Despite a few glitches with the webex we had an incredible turnout and some pretty interesting questions. I learned a lot about VMWare and I am pretty excited about the paradigm shift that is about to happen.

Virtualizing the data warehouse is not a typically part of an architecture road map. Vertica’s unique columnar database combined with pretty clever compression techniques minimize I/O to the point where virtualization is a viable option.

Imagine the possibilities:

Scale horizontially with virtual machines
Develop a data warehouse on your laptop using VMWare workstation
Move your warehouse from test to production effortlessly
Allocate server resources as needed
Isolate data for greater security and privacy
On Demand data warehousing allows you to incrementally grow your warehouse as needed
Scale-out – MPP architecture – Increase scale by adding Vertica instances to the cluster
VMware integration – Platform independence and centralized admin & deployment
All nodes created equal – No specialized nodes-simplifies deployment and eliminates single points of failure
Columnar storage format – Blazing query speed and minimizes I/O
Aggressive data compression – lowers storage costs and minimizes I/O
Built-in HA – automatic replication, failover and recovery
Priced for virtualization – Based on data volume, not # of CPUs

The flexibility is incredible. Vertica has created a virtual appliance that you can download and test drive. If you don’t have a virtualized environment, you will need to download VMWare’s free VMware Player to run it on your desktop.

Good luck and I look forward to your feedback.