NCR demonstrates world's largest data warehouse — Record-breaking 11 Terabyte Data Warehouse Uses NCR WorldMark Enterprise Servers —

Business Wire, Feb 27, 1996

TOKYO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 27, 1996--Continuing its leadership in developing data warehouses for commercial installations, NCR today unveiled the world's largest data warehouse at NCR's introduction of its WorldMark(TM) 5100M Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) server to the Asian market.

The record-breaking 11 terabyte (TB) data warehouse demonstrated by NCR is double the size of previously available competitive data warehouse demonstrations. This largest ever data warehouse was built using the NCR Teradata(R) database, NCR WorldMark servers and EMC storage technology. Eleven terabytes is the equivalent of 2.75 billion pages of text, or enough information to fill 220,000 four-drawer filing cabinets.

"The new NCR is not just leap-frogging the competition with this largest ever data warehouse demonstration. We're changing the game because we have real customer requirements driving us to break the 10 TB barrier with production -- not demonstration -- systems," said Mark Hurd, NCR's vice president of marketing, Computer Systems Group. "As demonstrated today by our 11 TB data warehouse solution, we have the technology and the experience to help our customers to build and manage decision support systems that can grow to virtually unlimited sizes as their businesses or decision support needs grow."

At the announcement in Tokyo, to demonstrate real-world capabilities, NCR used 50 workstations generating the equivalent of 3,000 managers querying the data warehouse. Specifically, the demonstration shows a manufacturing company's data warehouse providing information to managers on sales history and analysis to help the company launch a new product.

The NCR Teradata database system is used with the largest production data warehouse installations in the world, including six customers each with more than 1 TB of raw user data in their Teradata database. These large data warehouses provide businesses with the capability to process large amounts of information quickly, providing increased customer intimacy or operational excellence -- such as evaluating inventory at a fine level of detail -- making them ideal for all industries.

"Since its introduction four months ago, NCR has logged almost $200 million in WorldMark orders," said Hurd. "Customer demand for the WorldMark server system has been tremendous."

Large data warehouses can help customers better analyze customer information and evaluate inventory information. For instance, with retail organizations, this allows for remarkable efficiencies with perpetual inventory replenishment. Large retailers could also conduct market basket analysis on all transactions, such as conducting analysis on 3,000 stores, each with 5,000 transactions a day over a 30-day period. Market basket analysis is one of many applications that would process this volume of data. To learn how demographics affect retail sales, a large data warehouse can be used to evaluate how the relative wealth of an area affects individual items sold in a particular store.

"NCR can deliver it all. With this announcement today, there is no doubt that NCR can provide the computer power needed to serve the needs of businesses today and in the future," said Hurd.

Hurd explained that this is not just a "disk connectivity" announcement. Recently, other vendors have simply strung large numbers of disks together to claim leadership in large-scale data warehousing. NCR goes well beyond connectivity -- NCR delivers the largest data connectivity, the best price/performance and for 12 years they've provided proven value to data warehouse customers.

The NCR 11 TB data warehouse demonstrated today runs on ten 16-way NCR 5100M WorldMark servers, the Teradata database and the EMC Symmetrix 3500 open storage systems, capable of storing more than one terabyte of data on just 17 square feet.

"Through the partnership with NCR, we are providing customers with a proven technology that allows them to gather and rapidly analyze the tremendous amounts of information they generate about their customers every day," said Neal Waddington, EMC's senior vice president of strategic alliances. "This extends EMC's position as the most innovative independent storage provider in the open systems market."

WorldMark Server/Teradata Benchmark Tests

NCR also announced benchmarks results for its WorldMark 5100M server running the Teradata database, achieving industry-best results for the new Transaction Processing Performance Council TPC-D decision support benchmark. The performance results, which were tested under the rules of the TPC-D benchmark, are the best ever -- eclipsing the results of the IBM RS/6000 SP in both performance and price/performance. Specifically, at 100 GB the NCR WorldMark 5100M running NCR's Teradata DBS for UNIX Version 2 Release 1.1 database has a TPC-D power of 216.90 and a TPC-D throughput of 170.01 for a TPC-D Price/Performance of $28,272.10 per query-per-hour.

WorldMark 5100 Servers

Designed for enterprise-wide mission-critical and decision-support applications, the WorldMark Series 5100 incorporates a common hardware building block across high-end symmetric multiprocessing, clustered and massively parallel processing systems. The Series 5100 provides customers with a multi-dimensional growth capability in hardware, database systems and operating systems, allowing a business to start with a four-processor system and expand the system to incorporate up to thousands of processors and many terabytes of data.