Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
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FIGURE 9.1
Generic appliance architecture.
Appliance architecture
The fundamental design of the appliance is to remove all configuration processes and any sizing
requirements for the data warehouse by providing a preconfigured solution stack. The users typically
need to establish a baseline for performance and another for scalability before beginning the deploy-
ment of an appliance.
Figure 9.1
shows the general architecture of a DWA. In the overall architecture, an appliance
is made of two or more nodes with each node having its own set of processers, memory, I/O, and
storage. Each node in the architecture is interconnected by a switch (GigE/Infiniband). There is a
node designated as the “master” node (queen or leader node in some appliances), which is respon-
sible for interfacing with the users to service client requests, manage the distribution of data,
query or ETL workloads across the architecture, and marshal the resources pool and scalability
needs.
