HP launches BI appliance
HP launched a business intelligence platform at its Technology at Work conference in Berlin on Tuesday.
Neoview is a data warehouse — a combination of new hardware — that HP hopes will fill a major gap in the company's product line-up. Although HP claims to be one of the leading companies in business intelligence (BI) server deployments, so far it has relied on partners to deliver BI solutions.
The base system is a 16-processor unit with 3TB capacity — scalable up to 50TB — which can be accommodated in a single data warehouse. It costs $640,000 (£319,000). HP recommends one core processor (Intel Itanium) for two volumes of data.
Reliability has become more of an issue in data warehousing and business intelligence, along with performance, as companies run large data models with an expectation that results can be obtained very quickly.
Kevin Deyager, product manager for Neoview, said he expects the systems to compare on performance "with any on the market", although he was unable to provide any results from performance benchtests. HP claims to have "unparalleled performance" in handling complex queries, mixed workloads and high concurrency. Deyager said the company had put great emphasis on reliability compared with fault-tolerant systems.
BI specialists that will use Neoview include Cognos and Business Objects, Deyager said.