DATAllegro was founded on the idea that it was time to take a fresh look at the design of parallel data warehouses. Most of the existing parallel data warehouse technologies are based on research dating back to the mid-eighties. At that time, disk storage was so expensive that every effort was made to avoid the duplication of data. Unfortunately, this led to the network between the parallel servers becoming a bottleneck. As a result, very expensive proprietary hardware was required to overcome this problem and achieve acceptable performance. Looking at the problem from the perspective of the 21st Century, DATAllegro realized that we had the opportunity to take advantage of a much more powerful and cost effective hardware platform:new SATA drives such as Western Digital's Raptor have SCSI performance and reliability at much lower cost; 64-bit CPUs from Intel offer unprecedented processing power at low cost; 20Gbps Infiniband offers affordable, very high speed networking. Combining this new hardware with open source operating systems such as Linux and mature open source databases such as Ingres, provides an ideal platform on which to build a next generation data warehouse appliance. Taking this new platform as a starting point, DATAllegro invented a new way of distributing data across a number of servers and then running queries in parallel all without requiring any expensive proprietary hardware. The end result is a true breakthrough in data warehouse price/performance. Instead of paying millions for a traditional system, companies can achieve a 10-100x improvement in query performance, at a fraction of the cost of other providers.
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