A practical and tested infrastructure design for large business warehouse systems

Abstract

Large enterprises depend more and more on huge business information systems to determine trends in their markets and their business that will allow them to respond quickly and effectively. These systems have moved from being reference systems to becoming strategic tools for executive planning. This shift in focus as well as the increasing size of these systems has a significant impact on the practical management of these systems. The new role demands increased availability, as well as quick integration of new data, and fast response times. How does an IT organization manage a multi-terabyte (TB) database, with extreme availability requirements, and a fixed window of tolerance for failure recovery regardless of database size? This article describes a proof of concept done for such an enterprise to test the feasibility of a 60TB database using a system design based on conventional tools available today. The goal of this article is to present a practical approach to such a challenge.