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Managed Self-Service Business Intelligence from HP and Microsoft

The release of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, Microsoft SharePoint 2010, and PowerPivot for Excel enable the self-service BI solutions that have long been a challenge to deliver. Using the familiar Microsoft Excel interface, users can integrate information from enterprise data warehouses with manually constructed data or data from external sources at any time. External data sources can include data from a variety of sources, including Access, SQL Server, or SQL Azure databases, Analysis Services cubes, text files, data feeds, cloud services, Excel and PowerPivot workbooks, data from the Web, and other relational and multidimensional sources.

Users can then publish the results of their analysis to a SharePoint document library, thus centralizing their insights and enabling subsequent analysis using these workbooks as a source. By storing the PowerPivot workbooks in SharePoint, users can not only easily share the results of their analysis and collaborate with others, but they can also take advantage of other SharePoint features such as content management, search, social computing, and business intelligence dashboards. Using management tools for PowerPivot for SharePoint, IT can monitor workbook activity to keep track of popular data sources and to assess the impact of user queries on server resources.


HP Business Decision Appliance is a solution optimized for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010

The availability of managed self-service business intelligence technologies from Microsoft resolves many challenges experienced by users and reduces the need for IT to execute ad hoc requests. However, it does nothing to solve IT’s problems with hardware selection or the lack of appropriate skills necessary to install, configure, and tune these technologies. To resolve these latter problems, Microsoft and HP have jointly invested in the development of the HP Business Decision Appliance. This appliance provides several benefits:

  • Lower cost. The time spent by IT researching hardware and testing to find the configuration that will support the target workload is unnecessary because the HP Business Decision Appliance includes all the hardware necessary for a successful, high-performing implementation.
  • Deployment complete in hours, not months. An organization purchases the HP Business Decision Appliance as a single ready-to-use unit. After installing the unit in a rack, plugging it into a power source, and connecting it to the network, an administrator uses remote access to connect to the appliance and run a wizard that installs and configures the software components included with the appliance. No additional configuration or tuning is required before the appliance is made available for proof of concept or live deployment.
  • Optimal performance. Engineers from both companies have worked together to identify the appropriate hardware configuration and to tune the software configuration settings to work optimally with the appliance’s hardware components. In addition, the engineers have designed the appliance to specifically tune and balance the processor, network driver, memory, and storage components for the target workloads which can support up to 80 concurrent users in a small-to-medium-sized business or departmental proof of concept environments in a larger organization.

  • Easier operation. The HP Business Decision Appliance is designed for administrators with no prior experience with SQL Server and SharePoint technologies. It includes an administration console as a portal to appliance-specific tasks, including backup, restore, and shutdown. An administrator can locate all information relevant to managing the server in one easy-to-access location.