Data Warehouse Appliances: Driving the Business Intelligence Revolution

DmReview (another favorite mag of mine that's a sure chick magnet) has an interesting article about a trend to keep an eye on, Data Warehouse Appliances: Driving the Business Intelligence Revolution. It argues that a new approach of harware and software designed for data warehousing should replace the current patchwork that makes up most current environments.

In the absence of significant architectural improvements, the traditional answer to the growing BI problem is to continue to add more hardware. For example, a company may use an Oracle DBMS, an HP server and a storage solution from EMC. As their system grows, they may add Hitachi storage and a second server. These types of systems require data and user applications to be continuously tuned and optimized.

...
The data warehouse appliance is designed specifically for the streaming workload of BI and is built using commodity components. It architecturally integrates hardware, DBMS and storage into one opaque device and combines the best elements of SMP and massively parallel processing (MPP) approaches into one that allows a query to be processed in the most optimized way possible. A data warehouse appliance is architected to remove all the bottlenecks to data flow so that the only remaining limit is the disk speed - a data-flow architecture where data moves at streaming speeds.

Sounds a bit like the Teradata vision to me. It's a good argument though, sooner or later the black art of constructing the architecture of most BI environments will become much more standard over time.

Or, I can deifintely see the need for DW and BI appliances specific to a business process. Something that could (in a perfect world) get dropped in to an environment, and after data is mapped from sources to destination, it would magically have a multitude of of reports that can jump start a business unit.