Back in 2008, I was working for a telco in the Dominican Republic, consulting for their data warehouse team. I proposed a complete re-architecture of the data warehouse and the reporting platforms that the data warehouse supported. When I had to cost out the project, I had to include some hardware, primarily for the Ab Initio ETL tool we were going to migrate to, but also for the development and test servers, and more tape backup machines. All in all, the tab for the entire project grew to almost 2 million USD. It was just another reminder to me of how expensive a data warehouse can be…