Mellanox Technologies' InfiniBand solutions have been adopted by Microsoft as the networking I/O foundation for their SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) systems. The performance and efficiency of Mellanox InfiniBand gives Microsoft’s database and data warehouse customers’ massive runtime improvement in their workloads, such as loading, querying and exporting data.

Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) is a scale-out, massively parallel processing (MPP) relational database appliance targeted for data warehouse workloads that can reach from 10s to 100s of terabytes of data. Utilizing Mellanox InfiniBand, Microsoft PDW provides worldwide customers with performance advantages for a wide variety of usage scenarios:

• Economical, high-performance enterprise data warehouse or data mart
• Long-term storage in multi-tier data warehouses
• Stand-alone MPP data warehouse or distributed enterprise data warehouse
• Offloading applications from enterprise data warehouses to generate high-speed aggregation and queries
• Scaling data warehouses from 10s to 100s of terabytes

“In an MPP system, the major bottleneck that limits performance is the ability to efficiently move large amounts of data among nodes in the cluster,” said Claude Lorenson, Director of SQL Server Product Management, at Microsoft. “Utilizing Mellanox InfiniBand’s high throughput and CPU-offload technology, we can push the performance of SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse-based systems and provide data warehousing users with new business advantages associated with increased network I/O.”

“Mellanox and Microsoft are pleased to work together to add significant value and return-on-investment to their SQL Server customers’ day-to-day database activities,” said David Barzilai, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “Mellanox InfiniBand I/O networking products provide Microsoft’s worldwide data warehouse customers with faster results for their critical business applications and workloads.”