The EDW is a key technology used in every large company today. EDWs can
support a variety of workloads, including financial reporting, customer satisfaction analysis, manufacturing quality, shipping & logistics, as well as ad hoc
workloads from individual business units. An EDW often is the lifeblood of an
organization, and has strict policies to ensure maximum availability and performance for key business processes and departments. Today, most EDWs are
based in traditional data centers and come from a small handful of vendors,
including Oracle, Teradata and IBM.
A traditional EDW (Figure 1) is fed through a series of ETL processes from different online transaction processing (OLTP) systems. These OLTP systems are
commonly business unit specific and support a variety of transactional processing across the enterprise. The EDW serves as a focal point for analyzing
data across these OLTP platforms, while providing company wide operational
reporting.
As organizations begin to renew their EDW maintenance agreements, while
also adding in new and complex workloads, the cost of operating legacy systems continues to increase. Many organizations are also running into scalability challenges because legacy EDW technologies were not designed to handle
today’s complex analytical workloads. Many organizations are now looking to
cloud based technologies to allow organizations to more effectively manage
their EDW operational costs, while providing advanced capabilities for modern
data analysis. There are many reasons for leveraging cloud based technologies
to complement existing EDW platforms:
• Cost savings & cost flexibility
• Using PaaS to lower operational overhead
• Eliminating capital costs
• Eliminating costly license renewals
• Scalability
• Adding advanced capabilities
• Keeping historical data longer than is practical with an on-premise
solution
• Elastic capacity
One reason today’s EDW platforms are so complex is the growth in analytical
and operational workloads over the many years that organizations have utilized EDW platforms. This growth has led to a mix of workloads that do not
naturally fit together and can negatively impact one another with regard to
scheduling and performance.
For prioritization and planning, there are several key categories that EDW
workloads can be classified into:
Auditable – Auditable workloads include those that are key for business operations and that are legally required for the company to operate. These include
workloads for reporting organizational compliance, evaluating company risk
and responding to government requests. These workloads are the most critical
18 | THE DOPPLER | FALL 2016