Introduction

EMC recently announced its Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence/Analytics Competency Center (Competency Center) and the news has many asking, “Why? Isn’t EMC a storage company?” The answer to the latter is ‘Yes’—EMC is a storage systems market leader and has been for a while (it also happens to have fairly robust data protection, information management, and data security product portfolios, but these are often overlooked). This leadership position actually points to the answer to first part of the question: EMC opened up the Competency Center primarily because it is a storage market leader—and market leaders do not simply build new products, they innovate. They move forward in many ways, such as by dedicating engineering resources to integrate and optimize their products for use with other technologies for customer benefit.

Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence, and Data Analytic (DW/BI) applications all need storage—fast storage—so that employees can access information quickly. Given that these applications also house vital business data, they must be properly protected in the event of corruption, accidental deletion, or disaster. Customers do not have the time or the resources to integrate a multi-tier DW/BI application with a storage system and then continuously tune performance all while trying to make sure it stays up and running.

EMC understands these challenges and, together with nine of its DW/BI application partners (Greenplum, IBM, Microsoft, Netezza, Oracle, ParAccel, Sybase, Teradata, and Vertica), introduced the Competency Center to conduct research and development, host customer briefings, and conduct training sessions. Based in Santa Clara, CA (also the home of EMC’s CLARiiON Customer Engineering Lab), the Competency Center will be connected via telepresence to EMC briefing centers in Hopkinton, MA and Cork, Ireland, ensuring that customers have access to expert knowledge from anywhere in the world.

The DW/BI Storage Challenge

DW/BI are unique, multi-tier applications that continue to evolve: Companies like Netezza have altered the way queries are processed and executed, Oracle and Microsoft are constantly improving databases to deal with large amounts of information. As the application architectures change, IT staffs try to eliminate bottlenecks in the hardware infrastructure, with most of the attention spent tuning storage. If you ask any storage administrator how much time they spend on ‘laying out data’ for DW/BI applications, the response may shock you: Depending on the size of the data warehouse, it may be a full time job.

DW/BI applications have a very different storage profile than traditional OLTP applications. The data is more frequently accessed (read operations) than created (write operations). OLTP applications typically have intensive read and write operations and are more ubiquitous inside any data center. Because more applications align with the OLTP application profile, storage teams are used to configuring systems to generate the best possible performance. To use an analogy, think of the storage team as Honda auto mechanics familiar with a specific range of cars and trucks produced by the parent company. They are really good at changing the oil on a Civic and can handle break jobs on an Accord in no time. But if you bring in a Cadillac for service, it may take a little while. Even though they have been around for a while, DW/BI applications are the equivalent of the Cadillac in a Honda service shop—an outlier that takes longer to fix and optimize.

Complicating ongoing data optimization tasks is the amount of data storage teams have to handle due to rapidly increasing data warehouses. Fortune 1000 companies now measure such applications in petabytes as the amount of business conducted digitally increases. ESG estimates that database applications, the primary feeders of data warehouses, are growing by approximately 25% per year.[1] In addition to newly created information, organizations are saving more database data for longer periods of time: Nearly 60% of organizations are saving database information for four to ten years (see Figure 1). ESG views this as a positive sign—employees can make more informed decisions with access to more data. However, larger data warehouses can cripple application response times, leaving business users frustrated and unproductive. Storage teams, with their DW/BI application-owner counterparts, have to find ways to maintain acceptable levels of performance, regardless of how much data there is.

The Value

Almost all technology vendors have Executive Briefing Centers that include ‘Solution Labs’ where customers can peer through a glass window at a bunch of blinking green (red is bad) lights that prove product works. The Competency Center is not one of these ‘showcase’ labs; rather, it is where engineers will actually be working to test and integrate the aforementioned DW/BI applications with a variety of EMC products. The engineering efforts are expected to focus on bolstering application-various storage configurations.

While storage systems are EMC’s primary contributions to the Competency Center, engineers will also incorporate information management and data protection products as well. As an example, EMC has several remote mirroring solutions that can help keep DW/BI applications available if the primary infrastructure fails due to an unplanned outage or disaster. Setting up such a configuration and optimizing it for a particular database/application combination can help ensure a customer’s disaster recovery implementation will be functional if it is ever needed.

EMC will use the Competency Center to:

• Develop tested solution sets so that customers do not have to perform a significant amount of integration and internal engineering work after a purchase.
• Publish technical white papers for each of its application partners’ solution focusing on recommended implementation guidelines and reducing the ‘time to value’ for a DW/BI solution.
• Conduct education seminars for customers that may want to have a ‘hands on’ experience with an entire solution—from application to storage.
• Incorporate findings and customer feedback into future EMC product designs.

Ultimately, EMC is reducing the operational cost of deploying a DW/BI solution on EMC infrastructure as IT will not need to perform application/storage/data protection integration themselves. Also, storage teams will be able to tune the environment more easily (if, in fact, tuning is needed at all). Further, with pre-tested solutions, there is much less risk involved for the customer if expert training resources are readily available.

The Bottom Line

In 2009, organizations will really ‘have to do more with less.’ In the United States alone, there have been 700,000 layoffs since September 1, 2008 and more are likely to follow as the financial crisis stagnates world economies. What will not change is the amount of data organizations create and the criticality of this information in assisting decision support activities. As such, IT staff must keep DW/BI applications performing optimally, without dedicating resources to constantly tune underlying storage.

EMC has taken on this challenge with its investment in the DW/BI Competency Center. Its application partners also deserve some credit for allocating technical resources in order to make it a successful endeavor. However, the Center’s success will not be measured by the number of partners that sign up or how big the solution lab is; rather, it is the number of customers that take advantage of the training seminars, the quality of the technical white papers, the level of solution integration, and the new features that make DW/BI applications work better—specifically with EMC products—that will determine the true value.

People need data to make decisions and do their jobs. EMC’s Competency Center is designed to take the costs and risks out of improving information access.

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