Joseph Dal Molin wrote:
Hardware like this also has firmware, software by another name. The difference is in the use of 'generic' or commodity hardware versus specialized hardware.Just ran across this interesting development...an alternative to software licenses and open source for that matter displayed at Comdex is hardware:
This product is unique because they are following the appliance model. There are many companies that make 'filer' appliances which let you connect multiple LAN clients, i.e. Mac using AppleShare, PC's using LAN Manager and unix using NFS to a similar hardware box.
The idea of scaling the processing up for database queries by adding hardware in parallel was realized over a decade ago by Teradata, Inc (now owned by NCR).
See the technical article at this web site:
http://teradata.com/tech/datasheets.asp#database
I first read about teradata shortly after I graduated from grad school, when I was doing database work using pre-relational systems. I remember reading it in a CACM paper. At that time, they were using generic Intel Processors with no special operating system, just the teradata software.
Since then, they have decided to use commodity hardware running commerical OS's and act as a software layer.
Teradata has always wanted a hefty price for their systems so they ended up in the warehousing niche.
