Data Warehousing with Greenplum

Chapter 2. Deploying Greenplum

As the world continues to evolve, Greenplum is embracing change and now includes four deployment options. With the trend toward cloud-based computing, Greenplum has added public and private cloud to its list of deployment options. This gives Greenplum users four options for production deployment.

• Customer-built clusters

• Appliance

• Public cloud

• Private cloud

Custom(er)-Built Clusters

Initially, Greenplum was a software-only company. It provided a cluster-aware installer but assumed that the customer had correctly built the cluster. This strategy provided a certain amount of flexibility. For example, customers could configure exactly the number of segment hosts they required and could add hosts when needed. They had no restrictions on which network gear to use, how much memory per node, nor the number or size of the disks. On the other hand, building a cluster is considerably more difficult than configuring a single server. To this end, Greenplum has a number of facilities that assist customers in building clusters.

Today, there is much greater experience and understanding in building MPP clusters, but a decade ago, this was much less true and some early deployments were sub-optimal due to poor cluster design and its effect on performance. The gpcheckperf utility checks disk I/O bandwidth, network performance, and memory bandwidth. Assuring a healthy cluster before Greenplum deployment goes a long way to having a performant cluster.

Customer-built ...