February 19, 2007 - It's high performing, energy-efficient, and has super capacity. No, it's not a new hybrid SUV. It's the Data Warehouse Appliance from Sun and partner Greenplum, and it's re-inventing the way the world stores and analyzes data.

Sun first teamed with Greenplum to build a high-performance data warehouse appliance to meet streaming video challenges on Major League Baseball's Web site MLB.com. Following the success at MLB, the two companies pursued a long-term collaboration.

Greenplum's Greenplum Database is a massively parallel distribution of PostgreSQL database software that enables organizations to easily deploy terabyte-scale business intelligence (BI) systems on clusters of low-cost servers such as the Sun Fire X4500 data server. Bringing Sun and Greenplum technologies together created the brainstorm that led to the development of the new appliance.

The Data Warehouse Appliance

A commercial open-source BI tool, the Data Warehouse Appliance is powered by the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) and PostgreSQL, both mature products of open source development. "Greenplum and Sun are both strong supporters of open source software, and PostreSQL was already running on Solaris 10, so the Greenplum Database was a perfect fit for Sun," said Scott Yara, President of Greenplum.

The initial Data Warehouse Appliance offering consists of the Greenplum Database running on Sun Fire X4500 servers, with a Sun Fire X4100 server as a Master/Dispatch Server. The solution is offered in 20-, 40-, and 100-terabyte configurations.

Impressive Performance and Pricing

"The lightning-fast performance of this solution makes it a snap for companies to manage ever-increasing amounts of data on their networks," said John Fowler, executive vice president of the Systems Group at Sun Microsystems.

Data Warehouse Appliance specs include scan speeds as fast as one terabyte per minute for a DW100 RAID 10 configuration; a data warehouse load rate of more than 600 gigabytes per hour; a small footprint with up to 100 terabytes of capacity in a single rack unit; and power consumption of 110 watts per terabyte.

Price points are as low as $17.5K per usable terabyte for a RAID Z configuration. "For a comparable level of performance, our pricing beats the competitive offerings by a factor of 10 or more," asserts Yara.

About Greenplum

Greenplum's mission is to enable companies to manage massive amounts of information, and make it all useful. In addition to developing the world's leading commercial open-source database for BI and Data Warehousing, San-Mateo-based Greenplum sponsors The Bizgres Project (www.bizgres.org), a community effort designed to make PostgreSQL the most robust open-source database for data warehousing and business intelligence.

Sun Partner Advantage

By partnering with Sun, Greenplum received early access to the Sun Fire X4500 platform as well as vital engineering and marketing assistance. The two companies collaborated to develop an Opteron-powered appliance with a blazing fast 128-bit file system and a form factor with a density and power consumption previously unseen in the industry. Sun and Greenplum are working together to identify and close joint sales.

Partner Benefits

• Joint value proposition that is unique in the data warehouse marketplace, due to Sun's innovative technology
• Faster time to market due to extensive engineering and marketing support from Sun
• Expanded channel by leveraging Sun sales force
• Greater awareness and credibility in the marketplace because of Sun partnership

Learn More

To learn more about the Data Warehouse Appliance from Sun and Greenplum, please visit www.greenplum.com and www.sun.com/greenplum.