NCR'S powerful Teradata Database System for UNIX is now available worldwide; Seamless scalability on entire line of WorldMark SMP and MPP servers; Supports data warehouses ranging from gigabytes to multi-terabytes

Business Wire, April 16, 1996

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 16, 1996--NCR today announced that its Teradata Database System (DBS) for UNIX is now available worldwide, providing companies with an open, scalable and powerful data warehouse database system to transform valuable, cross-organizational data into useful and timely information.

NCR also announced today that the Teradata DBS for UNIX is ported to its WorldMark entry-level servers, making the database that runs the world's largest and most complex data warehouses available to a greater number of customers.

The Teradata DBS for UNIX -- which applies a state-of-the-art, shared-nothing software architecture -- provides unlimited scalability, powerful decision-support performance, high availability, low total cost of ownership, as well as seamless connectivity and ease of administration.

Now available on the entire NCR WorldMark family of scalable enterprise servers, Teradata DBS for UNIX enables customers to start their data warehouse on a WorldMark 4100 deskside symmetric multi-processing (SMP) server and grow to a large-scale WorldMark 5100 massively parallel processor (MPP) server, without changing the operating system, database software or decision-support applications.

"Users need an open system that can scale easily without the need to replace or redesign anything," said Mark Hurd, marketing vice president, NCR's Computer Systems Group. "With its UNIX-based open system design, we are bringing Teradata's power to our entire WorldMark family of servers, enabling a decision-support solution to scale seamlessly from a few gigabytes to a multi-terabyte data warehouse."

Entry-level Data Warehouses:

NCR expects the data warehouse market to increase five-fold over the next several years, with much of this growth being driven by smaller SMP installations.

"We're finding that data warehouses are no longer just for very large businesses," said Dan Harrington, NCR vice president of solutions marketing. "Eighty percent of today's potential data warehouse customers are now medium-sized businesses or individual departments in a large business. Teradata for UNIX coupled with entry-level WorldMark SMP servers is the perfect solution for those customers interested in getting their data warehouse started and being able to grow it in the future."

In addition, NCR recently introduced its Scalable Data Warehouse program that provides comprehensive programs -- integrating hardware, software and services -- tailored to companies' individual needs. "First Step" and "RightSTART" are programs to help first-time data warehouse customers build a production-ready data warehouse quickly at an affordable price.

Teradata DBS for UNIX - the Scalable Data Warehouse engine:

As the industry's leading data warehouse engine with 50 percent share of the commercial parallel processing market, the Teradata DBS can quickly process complex queries that provide users new insights into their businesses. The Teradata DBS uses massively parallel processing technology to sift through large databases by splitting the work among dozens, hundreds or even thousands of microprocessors.

Over the past decade Teradata has been optimized in real-world environments with hundreds of customers. NCR has produced the largest data warehouse in the world -- 11 terabytes running Teradata.

"NCR's achievement of the 11TB mark shows that Teradata and the 5100 are moving where the technology needs to be headed," said Randy Mott, senior vice president and CIO at Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.

To meet businesses' demands for timely answers to critical business questions, the Teradata DBS is designed to scale in multiple dimensions, including the amount of data loaded and managed, number of users submitting queries, number of complex queries made, and the number of business entities to be accessed by a query.

Ease of administration is a key attribute of Teradata systems. Teradata has helped reduce the DataBase Administration (DBA) workload by a factor of three or four over other database management systems. This is aided by Teradata's high-speed parallel utilities (load, update and export), best-in-class mainframe connectivity, and a design point that ensures steady parallelism and eliminates the DBA's need to constantly re-balance the system.

The Teradata database utilities and tools -- such as FastLoad, MultiLoad, FastExport, Dump/Restore/Recovery Utility, and BTEQ (Basic Teradata Query Tool) --support execution on both network-connected clients and channel-connected mainframes, such as IBM, Amdahl and Unisys. These utilities provide a robust and easy-to-implement integration with legacy databases and systems.

Teradata DBS for UNIX runs NCR's implementation of the UNIX System V Release 4 operating system, called MP-RAS 3.0. The open characteristics of UNIX will enable the Teradata database to be ported to other vendors' hardware platforms.

All existing client software and third-party tools that work with the original Teradata DBS (Version 1 Release 5.0 or greater) are fully compatible with the Teradata DBS for UNIX.