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Delivering Self-Service BI on the Windows PlatformContents Introduction 1

WhatisSelf-serviceBusinessIntelligence? 1

ThePromiseandRisksofSelf-serviceBusinessIntelligence 2

Self-serviceBusinessIntelligenceonaWindowsPlatform 2

DellandIntelforHigh-performanceBusinessIntelligence 4

Conclusion 6

IntroductionSelf-service business intelligence is jumping to the top of the IT priority list for one simple reason: as important as business intelligence is to the corporation, it doesn’t make sense to burden IT with business analysis tasks. There is great promise in giving business analysts direct access to data mining, report creation, analysis collaboration, and data publication. The more pervasive business intelligence is inside a company, the more sound decisions will be. On the other hand, if end-users cannot easily access or use the tools they need to perform the analyses, the IT burden is compounded rather than relieved. Dell and Intel and Microsoft have partnered to provide a high-performance, reliable, secure business intelligence platform that puts familiar applications and collaboration capabilities in the hands of business analysts while giving IT the tools it needs to efficiently manage and maintain the technology.

WhatisSelf-ServiceBusinessIntelligence?Consider the data that goes into a business plan or strategy. There is historical financial data that describes trends, market survey results, competitive analyses, current snapshots of the cus-tomer base, human resources distributions and cost projections, new product specifications and any amount of other marketing, sales, and operational data that is available. The more laborious the task of finding, compiling, and communicating that data, the slower organizations are at making good business decisions in time to gain competitive advantage.

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By coordinating the technology and processes that end-users need to collect, store, access, analyze, and communicate business data, self-service business intelligence supports sound, timely decision-making. The potential for business intelligence to help organizations identify revenue opportunities, cost savings, promotional opportunities or profitable product developments has moved it up on the SMB list of IT initiatives. In fact, the November 2010 issue of eCRM Guide listed self-service business intelligence as #7 on the top business intelligence trends.

To understand its top ten placement on IT to do lists, we have to focus on the self-service aspect of self-service business intelligence. While IT staff is skilled in database manipulation and report generation, they are not business analysts. The business analysts who know what data is needed to support a decision don’t know how to mine corporate databases to find it. This turns data access and mining into a large project that forces IT to build business analysis skills and business analysts to learn about database structures. There is no room in SMB budgets for that kind of redundancy and inefficiency, especially when it gets in the way of making sound, go-ahead decisions. The more IT can let go of business analysis tasks and focus on delivering high-performance, self-service business intelligence systems, the more pervasive sophisticated business analysis will become.

ThePromiseandRisksofSelf-ServiceBusinessIntelligenceSelf-service business intelligence doesn’t completely remove IT from the equation. IT management and technicians have to understand what corporate data exists, where it is stored, what applications are used to enter, generate and report data, and which end-users use those applications. However, by putting business intelligence data directly into the hands of people who know how to use it, IT saves hours in data mining and iterative report writing. The real promise of self-service business intelligence is that IT can allocate far more time to developing an efficient business intelligence platform that becomes a strategic asset.

Of course, as end-users gain access to business intelligence systems, they quickly tax datacenter operations. Rather than one IT database technician creating a report required by a work group, everyone in the work group generates their own version of the report. IT has to work with depart-ment managers to determine who needs access to business intelligence. The litmus test might include an employee’s expertise in business analysis as well as their ability to use the requisite applications without a lot of help desk support. And, of course, IT has to be sure that the business intelligence platform is powered by high-performance software and hardware.

Self-ServiceBusinessIntelligenceonaWindowsPlatformThe best way to simplify the delivery and use of business intelligence is by implementing a coordinated family of applications. Microsoft’s Business Intelligence Platform includes Microsoft Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, and SQL Server 2008 R2. The platform assumes that end-users will want to access as much data as possible as efficiently as possible, that most business analysis is collaborative, and that desktop sharing and other forms of workgroup communication is essential to sound decision making.

Microsoft Office applications (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) are familiar tools for most end-users who already know how to move data between them in order to fully analyze information, create reports, and share results. SQL Server 2008 R2 offers powerful database capabilities that organize

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and combine data sources underneath the application layer. SharePoint is a collaboration system that leverages advanced search to allow end-users to quickly find the data they need across the population of documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and messages. SharePoint’s social networking and other collaboration tools help end-users keep in touch with one another in order to promote and enrich business analysis input.

Using the Windows Business Intelligence Platform, business analysts are able to create work environments, find data, and create reports on their own or collaboratively without engaging IT support. Even the most basic level of self-service business analysis; maybe using SharePoint to publish and collaborate on an Excel spreadsheet to combines all product division sales for the same time period, might have required IT to join disparate data sources. Using the Microsoft platform, analysts across divisions are able to gather data from sales and marketing to create reports, find customer acquisition redundancy, and identify marketing and sales efficiencies.

Of course, most business analyses are more complex and require more sophisticated business intelligence capabilities. In most cases, the more sophisticated the analysis, the larger the underlying dataset. PowerPivot, a Microsoft Excel add-on, is an important part of the platform. PowerPivot enables business analysts to work with large amounts of data. Sorting and filtering is fast even when Excel spreadsheets have thousands of rows of data. Analysts can even set up automatic data refresh so that their work is always based on the most current information. PowerPivot also enhances security for spreadsheets that are the center of collaborative efforts and allow them to be accessed via a browser to support mobile users.

The Microsoft Business Intelligence platform’s feature set also allows analysts to, for example:

• quickly access and share important business metrics in order to track the success of marketing programs and product enhancements or indentify market trends via SharePoint Dashboards

• use SharePoint Communities to form project-based work groups and work flows without requiring IT to specify new access control policies

• create community wikis, share professional profiles, and tag resources to accelerate work between individuals work in various remote locations

• access SQL Server 2008 R2 via PowerPivot to create reports based on large amounts of data for analysis or publication purposes.

• use user-friendly data mining capabilities to conduct predictive analyses (e.g. analyze filtered data to determine web-based promotion effectiveness, look for trends in customer complaints, watch the impact of a new manufacturing process on quality)

That is certainly not the full extent of the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform’s self-service functionality. The broad and deep feature set accommodates an unlimited number of basic and power users, as well as large amounts of data. The benefits the platform offers end-users who crave access to business intelligence functionality are matched by those enjoyed by IT departments that want to deliver powerful business intelligence without having to actually engage in the work.

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For example, PowerPivot allows IT staff to monitor how collaboration and business intelligence is being used — how often, by which individuals, by which departments. That information and a management dashboard that displays performance and quality of service metrics allow them to proactively tune the environment. IT can also find server consolidation opportunities by identifying underutilized resources.

Data warehousing capabilities that are built into the business intelligence platform aggregate and compress data. That supports scalability, which is critical since easier-to-use business intel-ligence increases data gathering and storing. By minimizing storage requirements (the platform supports Unicode with UCS2 to reduce storage for Unicode encoded data) even as business intelligence use expands, IT is able to manage costs over time.

While the company wants to be sure that its business intelligence investment is well used, IT is responsible for making sure that it’s appropriately used and not to the performance detriment of other services being run from the datacenter. IT is also able to maintain control over the things it typically cares most about — user access, versioning, data access, and resource utilization. The Resource Governor, which allows IT managers to set resource limits for data applications to ensure consistent performance, is just one feature that streamlines platform management.

Microsoft also assists IT by streamlining deployment. Database schemas are packaged with deployment requirements so they can be quickly copied and installed on target systems.

Deploying a self-service business intelligence platform is one step in delivering self-service capabilities that empower analysts and free up IT. The next is creating a data center infrastructure that delivers the performance and reliability that keeps users and IT productive.

DellandIntelforHigh-PerformanceBusinessIntelligenceDell’s partnerships with Intel and Microsoft create the foundation for development and delivery of a high-performance, high-availability self-service business intelligence environment. Dell servers equipped with Intel processors and storage devices are designed to support data access, collaboration, analysis, report writing, and presentation creation. They scale easily as databases and companies expand. While the self-service business intelligence environment is the product of three leading technology enterprises, delivery through Dell offers the advantage of a single vendor relationship to further decrease IT management overhead.

DellServerswithIntelXeonProcessorsThe advantages of self-service business intelligence — ability of end-users to easily access data and create their own reports, as well as IT’s ability to let go of business analysis tasks and focus on management of the environment — are lost if systems are slow or unreliable. And investments in business intelligence platforms are unsustainable if they can’t scale easily or overburden IT costs with power and cooling requirements.

Dell’s broad array of PowerEdge servers are equipped with Intel® Xeon processors 5600 series and can be configured to any size business intelligence environment. Available in tower, rack, and blade models, PowerEdge servers support virtualization and high rates of consolidation to help contain datacenter costs.

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Performance is assured by Intel Xeon 5600 series multi-core processors that offer 15X better performance per watt than single core processors. That means that even intense data retrieval, graphics creation and collaboration between large, distributed work groups run well. End-users don’t have to wait for search results or generate reports from large databases.

Intel Xeon 5600 series multi-core processors further boost performance and savings through:

• Intel®TurboBoostTechnology– Server performance is automatically maximizedby increasing core frequencies which enables faster speeds for either specific threads or very heavy workloads.

• Intel®IntelligentPowerTechnology– The processor and memory don’t always need the same amount of power. Intel Intelligent Power Technology automatically shifts both CPU and memory to the lowest power state that still delivers the performance required. That not only saves on energy used to run the server, but also reduces the heat output, which in turn, reduces cooling requirements.

Given the energy, power, and cooling costs of data centers, all increases in workload and capacity should be tempered with energy efficiency, which is a strong suit of Intel Xeon processors 5600 series. Power consumption is scaled to workload. Even if servers are left on to accommodate around-the-clock workers and off-hours processing, less energy will be used at off-peak periods. That adds power savings benefits above those gained through server virtualization and consoli-dation. Additional energy savings is gained through:

• Automatedenergyefficiency– Idling cores (those that are not needed to support current workloads) are powered down to near-zero consumption independently of working cores to reduce overall power consumption.

• Automatedlow-powerstates– Processor, memory, and I/O controllers are automaticallyreduced to the power state that will support performance needed by the current workload.

PowerEdge server design further reduces power consumption. Fans automatically speed up or slow down according to internal temperature and Smart Chassis design provides air circulations and heat sinks that funnel heat outside the server and away from components. IT managers can set limits on power consumption. Low-voltage memory modules and efficient power supplies also trim energy usage.

Reliability is assured through redundant components (no single points of failure). Should a fan, power supply, or other component fail, its backup unit will take over until the broken primary unit is replaced. On top of being redundant, components are hot pluggable; they can be removed and replaced while the server is up and running. Reliability is further enhanced with dual internal SD (Secure Digital) modules for storing virtualization hypervisors. End-users do not lose access to applications when fixes are being made. Redundancy and hot pluggability create a safety net that protects consistent access to the business intelligence platform.

DellEqualLogicStorageDell EqualLogic storage devices, which, like Dell PowerEdge servers, come in a broad array of configurations and are built to accommodate virtual server environments. All devices assume database growth and can scale out performance and capacity. SMBs purchase only the storage

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they need knowing that expansion can easily happen at any time. This prevents over purchasing and under-utilization. It’s also why these devices are considered extremely cost-effective.

Like PowerEdge Servers, EqualLogic storage devices have redundant, hot-swappable components (fans, power supplies, disk drives with hot spares). Those features, along with a fault-tolerant, redun-dant controller and enterprise-class RAID protection enable devices to offer 99.999% availability.

DellServicesDell, Intel, and Microsoft offer many options for configuring a self-service business intelligence platform. Every business is able to deploy a system that meets strategic and operational needs, but IT managers are faced with many decisions and typically benefit from experienced advice.

Dell consultants and technicians are well versed in business intelligence planning, configuration, and deployment. Working with IT management, they specify server and storage combinations that are cost-effective for a company’s current size and business intelligence needs, but able to scale to anticipated levels. They are able to identify current resources that can be repurposed, opportunities for server and storage virtualization and consolidation, and ways to streamline deployment to end-users. Dell consultants can work on-site or via telephone to prescribe con-figurations that are needed today and to anticipate when and how business growth will demand additional capacity and performance.

Servers and storage devices are configured and tested at Dell before they are packaged for ship-ment. When they arrive in the data center they are ready for out-of-the-box implementation. IT might want consultants to be on-site to help with implementation or continue to access advice and information over the phone.

ConclusionBusiness Intelligence isn’t new. Companies have long been basing strategic and tactical moves on data that describes their operations and products. Moving the work of organizing, finding, and reporting data from IT to business analysts in the form of self-service business intelligence is new and taking off inside SMBs. As non-IT employees gain access to data, reporting, and analysis collaboration capabilities, IT’s job becomes platform delivery. Self-service business intelligence has to feature high performance and availability. Applications and processes have to be user-friendly. Security is essential. And, as companies and databases grow, the entire platform has to scale without service interruption. As always, realizing ROI depends on cost-containment. Dell, Intel, and Microsoft have partnered to deliver a market-leading self-service business intelligence platform that effectively moves analysis away from IT to business analysts. Windows applications are supported by server, processor, and storage technology along with end-to-end services that assure both performance and availability.