Data centers have long fought the fight between storing and maintaining the workflow. Storage networks simply aren't set up to understand, or even to be aware of applications, workflow and data access patterns. Even the so-called fixes - the general block-based storage arrays - fall short. While they do run any number of varied workloads, they aren't optimized for any specific workload function, nor do they understand any particular data retrieval or generation process. The gap between storing data and the genesis and use of that data is as wide as the Atlantic.

Data warehouse appliances are beginning to hit the radar screens of those in the data storage industry. Oddly, the applications have been around for a while, but haven't registered more than just name recognition among database admins. Odd because, as the Taneja Group puts it, "... a data warehouse appliance is a turnkey, fully integrated stack of CPU, memory, storage, operating system (OS), and RDBMS software that is purpose-built and optimized for data warehousing and business intelligence workloads."

So what can a data warehouse appliance do for you? Read this article to understand more of its capabilities, its availabity, and whether you can benefit from it.