Scaling globally is one of the biggest challenges for manufacturing organizations. For many years, enterprise software used as a basic backbone to solve problems of accessing information globally. Global IT, data centers, database clusters, applications integrations. To provide a single point of information access is a challenge for many of them. ERP and, later, PLM vendors made a multiple tries to implement global data warehousing and global data access.
Cloud is disrupting multiple areas these days. Some interesting announcements caught my attention earlier this week – Amazon Redshift disrupts data warehousing economics. Here is what Amazon Redshift is about:
Amazon Redshift is a fast and powerful, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. Redshift offers you fast query performance when analyzing virtually any size data set using the same SQL-based tools and business intelligence applications you use today. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can launch a Redshift cluster, starting with a few hundred gigabytes of data and scaling to a petabyte or more, for under $1,000 per terabyte per year.
Navigate here to learn more details. I captured the following passage with some useful technical information:
Redshift is made available via MPP nodes of 2TB (XL) or 16TB (8XL), running Paraccel’s high-performance columnar, compressed DBMS, scaling to 100 8XL nodes, or 1.6PB of compressed data. XL nodes have 2 virtual cores, with 15GB of memory, while 8XL nodes have 16 virtual cores and 120 GB of memory and operate on 10Gigabit ethernet.
Here is the place where this technology can be useful for manufacturing companies and manufacturing software. Today, even small manufacturing companies are global. It is not uncommon to see a 200 people manufacturing companies distributed over 5 different locations and working with suppliers all over the world. Current data warehouse technologies are out of reach for them as well as complex and expensive on premise PLM systems. Here is another quote from Information Week article that can give you a hint of what cloud can do for them.
Announcing RedShift at last week’s AWS re: Invent conference, Amazon senior VP Andy Jassy described how “expensive and complicated” data warehousing is for large companies and how “out of reach” it is for smaller firms. Delivered as a service, Redshift will cost as little as $1,000 per terabyte, per year. That will be “game changing” versus the estimated $19,000 to $25,000 per terabyte, per year that companies are used to shelling out for on-premises deployments, Jassy said.
What is my conclusion? 1TB of data for $1K. I think this scale can easy overlap a typical engineering archive in most of small manufacturing firm. Combined with global access and familiar SQL-based data access, it sounds like a perfect technological option. And this is a time for PLM vendors to think about the shift. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
Image courtesy of [David Castilio Doninici] / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
