SAP officially released on Wednesday its business intelligence (BI) accelerator which it co-developed with Intel. The two companies first announced they were working on the analytical engine a year ago.
SAP also worked closely with both IBM and Hewlett-Packard, along with Intel. The engine enables customers to quickly analyze and query huge amounts of their business data on the fly without having to pre-aggregate and store the information in a database prior to querying it. The accelerator interfaces with SAP's NetWeaver business intelligence software.
"It gives a Google-like experience on collections of data," Shai Agassi, president of SAP's product and technology group, said in a Wednesday keynote address at the company's U.S. Sapphire user conference in Orlando, Florida. In the lab, SAP thought BI accelerator was "beyond cool," he said, but the company was curious to see how users took to the engine.
The BI accelerator comes pre-installed on blade servers from IBM or HP powered by Intel's 64-bit Xeon processor.
SAP shipped BI accelerator to 30 initial customers in October 2005 including Novartis, The Coca-Cola Co., and British Petroleum. Once it had implemented the engine, beverage manufacturer Coca-Cola saw the time to run a query against 60 million rows of data drop from 30 to three seconds, Agassi said.
BP used BI accelerator to more rapidly query five fiscal quarters of its retail data gathered from all its gas stations across Europe amounting to over one billion data records.
In trialing BI accelerator, SAP has recently been using blades based on Intel's latest dual-core Xeon processor, code-named Woodcrest, and has seen a doubling in performance speeds versus the older Xeon chips it initially used last year, Agassi said.
The BI accelerator will help bring SAP closer to "the Holy Grail of providing analytics to the masses," Agassi said. The engine can feed query reports to users via the Duet integration SAP has announced between its applications and Microsoft's software.
It may also use Project Muse, SAP's upcoming new user interface for its offerings.
SAP may look for the BI accelerator to run on blades from vendors other than HP and IBM, Agassi said. "We expect thousands of the devices to go out to the market," he added.
Although SAP hasn't formally released pricing for BI accelerator, in his keynote, Agassi priced the engine at a little under $200,000.
Get the independent advice and expertise you need to support a virtual workforce.
The increase in Linux popularity has increased the frequency and sophistication of malware attacks. Read this 2 page white paper now to learn how you can protect your Linux environment with real-time protection that is certified by all major Linux vendors.
Download now »
Ensuring acceptable application delivery will become even more difficult over the next few years. As a result, IT organizations need to ensure that the approach that they take to resolving the current application delivery challenges can scale to support the emerging challenges. This handbook elaborates on the key tasks associated with planning, optimization, management and control and provides decision criteria to help IT organizations choose appropriate solutions.
Download now »
A common misconception is that mid-range storage requirements are dramatically different than that of a larger enterprise. Mid-range storage users may require less capacity, but they have similar functionality and management requirements. This ESG paper examines mid-range storage needs and reviews a new solution that adjusts size while retaining value, performance and functionality.
Download now »
Recommend This
