Data Warehousing with Greenplum, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3. Deploying Greenplum

Greenplum remains a software company. That said, its analytic data warehouse requires a computing environment and there are many options. As the computing world continues to evolve, Greenplum’s deployment options have embraced these changes. The evolution of faster networks, high-speed memory-based storage, and multicore CPUs have led to a rethinking of how to build “bare metal” Greenplum clusters. The advances in facilites offered in public and private clouds make them more attractive as deployment options for Greenplum. And lastly, the emergence of container-based products like Kubernetes provide yet another deployment option.

Custom(er)-Built Clusters

For those customers who wish to deploy Greenplum on hardware in their own datacenter, Greenplum has always 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 brand of network gear to use, how much memory per node, or 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, ...