Dell pushes data warehousing appliance for mid-size firms

Dell has unveiled the Quickstart Data Warehouse Appliance 1000, a storage platform designed to extend data analytics to the mid-sized business space.

The company said that the appliance, which will be based on a combination of Dell's PowerEdge server hardware and Microsoft's SQL Server 2012 software, would allow smaller firms to run business analytics tools.

The appliance has been designed to function as a stand-alone system for data warehousing and analysis, offering up to 5TB of storage and working with data integration services as well as the Dell Boomi platform.

Dell said that the aim of the appliance was to offer mid-market firms a complete and easy platform for moving into the data analytics and warehousing spaces.

"Mid-market organisations, not unlike large enterprises, are challenged by the explosion of data volumes and are looking for better ways to analyse and use this data to gain business insights and stay competitive," said Ben Linder, Dell executive director of data warehousing and business intelligence.

"Limited IT resources and budgets have mostly prevented mid-sized organisations from building data warehouses and realising the insights they need."

Dell is one of several vendors who have moved to expand the reach of data analytics and warehousing platforms in the enterprise space in recent years.

As the cost of hardware has fallen and data loads have gone up, fields such as big data and business intelligence have scaled down from the large enterprise space and into the mid-market.

A 2011 poll by V3 found that the big data space was already catching the eye of a sizeable portion of the business world while a large percentage of companies expressed curiosity in the field and an interest in integrating big data.