Solving Operational Business Intelligence with InfoSphere Warehouse Advanced Edition

Chapter 2. Overview of InfoSphere Warehouse Advanced Edition 65

sub-divided further into individual platforms. Even in this format they can still

share resources, meaning the Optim metadata database.

2.3.3 Alternative IBM solutions for data warehousing

In this section we briefly discuss the alternative product offerings available from

IBM Information Management for providing a complete data warehousing

solution, to give you an understanding of their relationship to the InfoSphere

Warehouse product range. The three main solutions are listed here:

򐂰 IBM Smart Analytic System

This is an integrated solution that encompasses both hardware and software

into an integrated platform. It provides rapid deployment and a faster

implementation solution, while also lowering the cost.

The IBM Smart Analytics System is a set of offerings that covers a wide range

of base hardware platforms, thereby allowing flexibility of both cost and

performance and giving the choice of the best solution to meet a customer’s

challenges. IBM InfoSphere Warehouse is one of the main software

components within the IBM Smart Analytics System. Figure 2-25 illustrates

one of the IBM Smart Analytic System offerings.

Figure 2-25 IBM Smart Analytics System

 Integrated Cognos Business Intelligence

 Integrated InfoSphere Warehouse

 In-database cubing and mining

 Choice of platform

IBM Smart Analytics System

The modular system for business analytics

 Scale "On Demand"

 Modular application interfaces

 Built for complex and mixed workloads

 Autonomic tuning

66 Solving Operational Business Intelligence with InfoSphere Warehouse Advanced Edition

򐂰 IBM Netezza Analytics

This is also an embedded, purpose-built, advanced analytics platform

consisting of special scalable, high-performance hardware combined with

advanced built-in software that provides an integrated database and a

massively parallel analytic platform designed to work with petascale data

volumes.

This technology solution is aimed at enterprise customers who have BI

questions, where both performance and the volumes of data result in a

normal solution being impracticable. Figure 2-26 illustrates the IBM Netezza

Analytics solution.

Figure 2-26 IBM Netezza Analytics solution

򐂰 IBM InfoSphere DataStage

This is a software platform that can be installed on a range of

high-performance hardware platforms. It provides these unique capabilities:

– A powerful ETL solution that supports the collection, integration and

transformation of large volumes of data, with data structures ranging from

simple to highly complex. It can manage data arriving in real time and data

received on a periodic or scheduled basis.

 Purpose-built analytics engine

 Integrated database, server and storage

 Standard interfaces

 Low total cost of ownership

 Speed: 10-100x faster than traditional system

 Simplicity: Minimal administration and tuning

 Scalability: Peta-scale user data capacity

 Smart: High-performance advanced analytics

IBM Netezza

The true data warehousing appliance

Chapter 2. Overview of InfoSphere Warehouse Advanced Edition 67

– A scalable platform that enables companies to solve large-scale business

problems through high-performance processing of massive data volumes.

By leveraging the parallel processing capabilities of multiprocessor

hardware platforms, IBM InfoSphere DataStage Enterprise Edition can

scale to satisfy the demands of ever-growing data volumes, stringent

real-time requirements, and ever-shrinking batch windows.

– Comprehensive source and target data sources support for a virtually

unlimited number of heterogeneous data sources and targets in a single

job includes text files; complex data structures in XML; ERP systems such

as SAP and PeopleSoft; almost any database (including partitioned

databases); web services; and business intelligence tools such as SAS.

– Real-time data integration support operates in real-time. It captures

messages from Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) queues using JMS

or WebSphere MQ adapters to seamlessly combine data into conforming

operational and historical analysis perspectives. IBM InfoSphere

Information Services Director provides a service-oriented architecture

(SOA) for publishing data integration logic as shared services that can be

reused across the enterprise. These services are capable of

simultaneously supporting high-speed, high reliability requirements of

transactional processing and the high volume bulk data requirements of

batch processing.

There are points of integration between InfoSphere Warehouse and

InfoSphere DataStage. An example is the ability for Design Studio to both

import datastage flows and call for the execution flows on an InfoSphere

DataStage system.

68 Solving Operational Business Intelligence with InfoSphere Warehouse Advanced Edition