Most organizations understand the importance of implementing business intelligence (BI) solutions. BI and data analysis are vital tools for transforming the raw data that’s generated by an organization’s line of business (LOB) applications into intelligent information that can be used to drive the business decision-making process. However, there are several hurdles to implementing BI solutions. BI technologies are different from the relational technologies that are used to support most business applications. Implementing performant and scalable BI solutions requires a different hardware platform and skill set from the relational databases that drive LOB applications. The HP Business Decision Appliance (BDA) is designed to address these technological hurdles by providing a ready-to-run BI appliance that lets businesses quickly deploy BI solutions throughout the organization.
I reviewed the new HP Business Decision Appliance at the Microsoft Enterprise Engineering Center (EEC) on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington. The BDA is designed to be a BI platform for small and midsized businesses (SMBs), as well as branch offices or departments in an enterprise. The BDA provides more than adequate scalability for most SMBs; in an enterprise scenario, it can act in concert with a larger enterprise data warehouse, such as the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse, in a hub-and-spoke arrangement whereby the BDA functions as a data mart for different subsets of the organization.
Under the Hood
The HP BDA is based on the HP ProLiant DL360 G7. Unlike a standard server that you might buy from an OEM, the BDA comes preconfigured. There’s nothing for the customer to worry about or change. The BDA is a 1U appliance that comes with dual Intel six-core X5650 2.67GHz Xeon processors. It’s equipped with 96GB of RAM and eight 10,000rpm 300GB Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives. The first two drives are mirrored for redundancy and contain the system software. The remaining six drives are configured in a RAID 5 array that provides a total of 1.5TB of storage. The RAID 5 array on the unit I tested was split into a 653GB D drive that contained the Microsoft SharePoint database and logs and a 713GB E drive that was used for system backup. Because the appliance is intended as a one-step install-and-run type of device, there are no PCI slots for additional add-on components. The front panel of the appliance houses a VGA video port, one USB 2.0 port, and an HP Systems Insight Display (SID) that provides easy-to-access system diagnostic information. Although I wished there were more USB ports on the front, I did like the easy access to the system diagnostics.
The back of the unit has two USB 2.0 ports, four 1GB Ethernet ports, one VGA video port, one serial port, and one Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) port for remote management. Notably, like many of the newer server units, there are no PS/2-style mouse and keyboard ports. The unit also lacks a DVD or optical drive. The system has two 460W hot-swappable power supplies. The BDA is essentially designed with the goal of efficiently serving multiple PowerPivot workbooks using SharePoint.
Deploying the BDA
Installing the appliance was surprisingly easy, considering that the process essentially consisted of installing three different products: Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition, SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition, and SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition. To begin the installation, I first connected to the BDA using HP’s iLO 3 management software. Like a standard HP server, the BDA supports full out-of-band management using iLO. iLO lets you power the appliance on and off, as well as perform other systems management tasks, such as running system diagnostics, checking system logs, and monitoring the status of the system’s hardware components. Using iLO on the BDA was exactly like using it on a standard HP server. Figure 1 shows the iLO console connected to the BDA.
Figure 1: Integrated Lights-Out management