News

Big Blue Offers BI Help to AIX Users

• By Kathleen Ohlson
• August 17, 2005

IBM introduced business intelligence software aimed to allow AIX users to archive, integrate and analyze vast amounts of historical data.

The IBM Data Warehousing Balanced Configuration Unit for AIX lets customers build data warehouses as modular building blocks, using open components. BCU is designed to help IT organizations consolidate data from many data marts into an enterprise-wide data warehouse that handles multiple terabytes of information and provides a single view of enterprise activities.

The warehouse is mapped to a pool of resources or nodes, and companies add more blocks to scale as their needs require. The BCU framework allows each building block to contain a subset of the data warehouse, and the combination of BCU nodes comprises the larger data warehousing system. Nodes in the data warehouse are each configured with the same operation system, server, software and storage.

The BCU consists of IBM DB2 Universal Database Data Warehouse Edition, IBM eServer p5 575 and IBM TotalStorage DS4500. The DB2 middleware allows companies to build and manage data warehouses, develop on-demand business applications, extract business insights and identify risks. The DS4500 storage server offers up to 67TB of scaling, and a 2Gbps Fibre Channel SAN connects it to the p5-55 for data access and scalability. The BCU framework offers redundancy for hardware and software, preventing a single point of failure.

The node can also function as a data warehouse, integrating data from single-subject databases, such as financial, manufacturing and sales, and delivering that information to users via BI applications.