Linux On Wall Street

Terabyte-scale Database Analytics: Integrated Appliances vs Linux Clusters

Database analysis has today become a core strategic competency for many enterprises. Knowledge derived from analytics have become the key drivers of corporate strategy. Evidence of the importance of analytics can be found in the ever-growing mountains of data being collected by enterprises across many markets. For example, banks, hedge funds, credit card and insurance companies, and others in the Financial Services industry depend heavily on analytics to handle processes such as risk profiling, portfolio pricing, marketing campaign management, and fraud detection. Data volumes today are easily in the terabyte-scale, even for medium-size businesses. Analysis of terabyte-scale databases requires planning and careful choice of computing/storage systems to achieve reasonable performance. In recent years, the legacy "big Unix box" solutions are being challenged by two competing alternatives: fully-integrated "Appliances" and large Linux clusters. This panel will discuss the challenges, the emerging Appliance vendors, and the trade-offs versus commodity clusters.