DAYTON, Ohio, Oct. 2 /PRNewswire/ -- To help executives cut through the confusion and make better, more informed data warehouse buying decisions, Teradata, a division of NCR Corporation (NYSE: NCR), today announced the expansion of its ten-year-old San Diego benchmarking facility. The expansion creates new capacity for businesses to test the Teradata data warehouse and analytic applications in a demanding, real-world environment.
Like test driving a car before buying, many businesses use benchmarking to test database capabilities as a part of the buying decision. Selection of the best database is critical to businesses that depend upon data warehouses and analytic applications to better serve consumers and, ultimately, power their corporate growth.
Before making any buying decisions, Forrester Research recommends that businesses thoroughly test software in customized benchmarking environments with their own real-world operational data, instead of relying on the industry standard benchmarks. Using customized, real-world benchmarks can help make sense of the many confusing vendor claims about the performance of data warehousing software.
"The results of a head-to-head benchmark of the full warehouse have proven that the Teradata-based solution provided a 300 to 700 percent improvement in query and processing performance over a dedicated-mainframe DB2 environment. Teradata achieved even greater results when compared to the production DB2 legacy environment when shared with various transaction-processing applications at Highmark," said Darren Macioce, vice president, Healthcare Informatics, Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield, one of the nation's largest Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans.
"Any vendor can boast about their published industry benchmarking results; however, few can successfully compete when customer-specific benchmarks are used. These benchmarks are the true indicators of how a customer's application will actually perform on a given platform," said Vickie Farrell, vice president Teradata database marketing.
Farrell further commented, "Teradata won 100 percent of the business in competitive customer-specific benchmarks during 2000. The tougher the tests, the better, because Teradata database has consistently achieved even higher performance levels against its competitors in these more demanding real-world benchmarks."
To perform a benchmark with Teradata database, a dedicated team works closely with the customer to tailor the entire testing process. Customers are encouraged to bring their own data to use in the testing, with some bringing more than five terabytes of operational data.
With the data in hand, the customer provides the business questions, and the team develops queries to run against the database. In many cases, businesses have brought lists of queries to the benchmarking session that they have not yet been able to run on their current platform. In addition to using real-world data, the Teradata benchmarking team assembles the nodes, disks, tape drives and any other equipment required to create a customized system to fit the needs of the business.
Teradata encourages businesses to thoroughly test software and evaluate its ability to meet the company's needs based on selected criteria, some of which include: manage large numbers of concurrent users, mixed workloads, ad hoc query performance, data modeling and analytics, ease of management, and overall speed and price.
As a part of the commitment to customers, the benchmarking center also provides a range of services, such as capacity planning, testing of third- party software, help for businesses getting started with data mining and Web mining.
"Bull used the Teradata benchmark facility in San Diego in 2001 to demonstrate Teradata's power to handle major increases in the data volume -- from its original size to two times, four times and eight times larger than the original database. In every case we were able to prove that, with the prospective customer's own complex and multi-user queries, the performance of the system would remain constant despite the increase in data volume. This prospect has since awarded the data warehouse project to Bull with the Teradata system over several other bids," said Floyd Mays, project director, Bull Worldwide Information Systems.
According to Farrell, customers are so satisfied with testing their company's applications running on the Teradata system that some have requested that the test system be shipped "as is" to their site. In one instance, a new customer requested that a high speed T1 communication connection be established with their offices, so work could begin immediately.
About Teradata Division
Teradata, a division of NCR Corporation, offers powerful analytical solutions that help businesses drive growth. Teradata solutions include the Teradata database, and analytical applications for customer relationship management, operations and financial management, business performance management and e-business. To learn more about Teradata Division and its solutions, go to http://www.Teradata.com .
About NCR Corporation
NCR Corporation (NYSE: NCR) is a leader in providing Relationship Technology(TM) solutions to customers worldwide. NCR's Relationship Technology solutions include the Teradata(R) database and analytical applications such as customer relationship management (CRM) and demand chain management, store automation systems and automated teller machines (ATMs). The company's business solutions are built on the foundation of its long- established industry knowledge and consulting expertise, value-adding software, global customer support services, a complete line of consumable and media products, and leading edge hardware technology. NCR employs 33,300 in more than 100 countries, and is a component stock of the Standard & Poor's 500 Index. More information about NCR and its solutions may be found at www.ncr.com .
NCR and Teradata are trademarks or registered trademarks of NCR Corporation in the United States and other countries.
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SOURCE NCR Corporation
CONTACT: Dan W. Conway, Teradata Division of NCR Corporation, +1-858-485-3029, or dan.conway@ncr.com/