14 DAY TRIAL // A solution designed to accelerate customers’ data warehouse roadmaps from Microsoft is enjoying what the company called a remarkable adoption level, following its introduction at the end of the past year. SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse 2.0 is essentially designed to deliver SQL Server 2008 Enterprise scalable reference architectures connected with offerings from HP, Dell, Bull, EMC and IBM. The promise from Microsoft is that the Fast Track Data Warehouse is capable of helping customers cut costs, but also spend less time with building data warehousing architectures, while also enjoying a reduced level of risk because of the references and best practices made available.
“We are seeing remarkable worldwide adoption of Fast Track with customers in more than 10 countries including the US, UK, France, Germany and S. Korea. Those customers come from over 10 industries including telecommunications, retail, healthcare, travel, media & entertainment. In some cases, Fast Track Data Warehouse is helping customers reduce their DW costs by over 50% without compromising on performance and scalability,” revealed a member of the SQL Server team.
Microsoft is gearing up to release its next generation data platform for customers ahead of May 2010, namely in the next couple of months. The only SKU of SQL Server 2008 R2 that will be released later in the first half of 2010, is SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse, for which Microsoft has already wrapped up the Technology Preview 1 stage. As far as SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse is concerned, the Redmond company is currently inviting companies to test drive the product as the development process advances to Technology Preview 2.
“In November 2009, we released Fast Track Data Warehouse version 2.0. This release focuses on the latest hardware and processor innovations with new reference architectures from AMC, Bull, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM and Intel. Fast Track 2.0 utilizes the Symmetric Multi Processing (SMP) model, which allows the warehouse to scale to tens of terabytes and as those data storage needs grow, we offer a good migration path to Parallel Data Warehouse,” the SQL Server team representative added.