Microsoft’s new Massively Parallel Processor (MPP) data warehousing appliance, SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse Edition, has been released to manufacturing. “We have appliances available from Hewlett Packard that will be available to customers in December, a very exciting milestone for us,” says Ted Kummert, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Business Platform Division.

Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) Edition meets the needs of organizations that manage large volumes of data (e.g., hundreds of terabytes or petabytes of data) and want to be able to make decisions over that data.

“This is a product that’s unique in terms of us delivering it as an integrated hardware and software solution optimized with our partners,” says Kummert. “There’s an opportunity to deliver a much different value proposition to customers and we think we’re going to hit that in this space.”

For more information about SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse Edition, check out the following articles:

Getting Started with Parallel Data Warehouse 

SQL Server 2008 R2 New Features 

Tom Casey on Microsoft’s BI Strategy