March 27, 2019 | Written by: Miran Badzak
Categorized: Data Analytics | Databases
IBM Cloud’s Db2 Warehouse Flex is coming to Amazon Web Services
Last year, we revolutionized data warehousing on the IBM Cloud. We released Db2 Warehouse Flex, our second-generation, fully managed, cloud data warehouse as a service that allows our clients to independently scale storage and compute. The service was built with cloud blocks from the very start—Kubernetes for container management, high-performance block storage for user data, and high-performance bare metal servers for compute.
The client response has surpassed even our wildest imaginations, with high triple-digit growth in a number of data warehouses deployed over the last six months alone, double-digit increase in active use, and high triple-digit growth in data under management. That means that our clients are not only feeding a ton more data into their cloud data warehouse, but it’s making a significant and positive impact on their business. Or, to put it differently, our clients love us.
Today, I’m thrilled to announce a strategic escalation in our approach to cloud data warehousing. We’re bringing Db2 Warehouse Flex to Amazon Web Services as a fully managed, scalable, and elastic cloud data warehouse. We’ve taken IBM’s multiple decades of experience in data warehousing plus our massive IP portfolio to another one of the leading public cloud providers. This is a killer mix.
As Rob Thomas, General Manager for IBM Data + AI, noted:
“It’s all about the client. It’s always about the client. With this release of Db2 Warehouse Flex on AWS as a fully managed and cloud-scalable data warehouse, we’re eliminating the stress of cloud vendor lock-in. Whatever your data architecture, wherever your data needs to reside, we’ll meet you there.”
Here’s what we’re bringing to the market today
- Two Flex models—Flex and Flex Performance: Flex is ideal for cost-effective data warehousing, dev/test environment, or infrequently accessed data sets. Use Flex Performance for, you guessed it, high-performance production workloads.
- Independent scaling of storage and compute: Scale (burst) on compute (up to 576 cores or 1,152 vCPUs) and increase storage (up to 144TB, not accounting for compression). More storage and compute is available with a slider-bar or an API-call.
- Self-service backup and restore: Up to seven snapshot backups included, with an option for unlimited backups to AWS S3. Restore with the click of a button.
- Fast-recovery HA: Compute nodes (EC2 instances) are all managed by the AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service. As soon as a compute node becomes unhealthy, a new healthy node is activated, and you’re quickly up and running again. All completely automated.
- AWS platform deployment: Our data warehouse runs natively on AWS and leverages AWS building blocks. EC2 for compute, EKS for container management, EBS for storage, S3 for data lake and data load/unload, CloudWatch for logging, and so on. Deployment coming to North America first, with the rest of the world to quickly follow.
Get started today
We’re incredibly excited to have you give Db2 Warehouse a go on AWS. Contact your IBM Data + AI (Analytics) sales representative to start a proof-of-concept (POC) and learn about our aggressive one- and three-year pricing options.