CLARiiON joins forces with Oracle and NEC to build multi-terabyte data warehouse; Demonstrates Oracle test-to scale program; 2.5-Terabyte CLARiiON RAID 5 decision support solution is largest for Japanese Kanji character set; Uncompromised performance and availability — less expensively

Business Wire, Jan 16, 1996

SOUTHBORO, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 16, 1996--The CLARiiON Business Unit of Data General Corp., announced today it has joined forces with two of the world's largest open systems companies, Oracle Corp. and NEC Corp., to demonstrate a 2.5-terabyte decision support solution (DSS) to thousands attending Oracle Open World in Makuhari, Japan.

Using standard technologies, the three industry-leading vendors have built a world-record-size commercially configured data warehouse for Japanese Kanji character set data.

The data warehouse showcases the Oracle Test-to-Scale program, a project designed to validate the capability of the Oracle Universal Database and a hardware platform to support a terabyte-scale data warehouse. The Test-to-Scale Program shows how open systems vendors are not only capable of supporting very large data warehouses, but are also committed to working together to provide complete data warehousing solutions.

The 2.5-terabyte data warehouse with Japanese Kanji character set data consists of the CLARiiON RAID 5 storage system, the Oracle Universal Database with parallel query options, and an NEC eight-way Unix SMP system. A terabyte is equal to one trillion characters - the equivalent of 500 million pages of text or approximately 40,000 four-drawer filing cabinets of information.

"We are pleased to participate in this test-to-scale exercise with our partners Oracle and NEC," said Larry Hemmerich, vice president and general manager of the CLARiiON Business Unit. "We wanted an opportunity to demonstrate the value that CLARiiON engineering can bring to DSS customers around the world. RAID 5-based solutions are a cost effective way to implement large scale data storage systems. Demonstrating a variety of successful approaches to data warehousing proves to customers that this exciting new technology is ready and able to provide their business with a competitive edge today."

"We are very excited to have an opportunity to showcase NEC's technology leadership and commitment for the very large data warehouse market," said Hiroshi Hatta, vice president, NEC Corp. "Combined with NEC's broad expertise in large scale systems integration, NEC can now offer a very cost effective alternative for our customers looking for a large data warehouse solution."

"We are witnessing tremendous growth for data warehousing in Asia. The team effort of Oracle, CLARiiON and NEC will provide the technology for this burgeoning market," said Takaaki Nagayama, general manager, Oracle's NEC Products Division. "It is very significant that we have implemented a data warehouse in multi-byte data capable of supporting a variety of Asian characters."

The data warehouse was created and stress-tested by a team comprising technical experts from the three companies. This effort requires close teamwork for project definition, resource allocation and implementation. Lead teams were assembled for the technical execution of the test-to-scale project which spanned the geographical locations of Westboro, Mass., Redwood Shores, Calif. and Tokyo where the database was created at NEC's Computer Group Development Center.

First, the CLARiiON-Oracle-NEC team created a 1.3 terabyte relational database and managed the database load operation. This database incorporates approximately 6 billion line item rows. Over several days, the database and pointers were loaded onto eight CLARiiON disk array subsystems, each supporting over 300 million bytes of data. The aggregate size of the data warehouse including the spaces for indexes and temporary working areas amounted to 2.5 terabytes. The database is being exercised and stress-tested on an eight-way NEC UP4800 SMP system, running NEC/UX 11.4 operating system. The stress test involved load and query exercises as well as, data placement on storage devices. The use of hardware and data redundancy simulated a mission critical operation.

The Test-to-Scale Program was run using the Oracle Universal Database, which extends the flagship software's unparalleled performance, scalability and functionality for data warehousing applications. Oracle Universal Database incorporates sophisticated features for parallel-aware optimization, bit-mapped index queries, unlimited star queries, adaptive parallel queries and parallel hash joins, making it the industry's most comprehensive set of database functionality to serve as the foundation for customers' data warehousing applications.

The terabyte data warehouse validates the scalability of the Oracle Universal Database on NEC/UX 11.4 in very large DSS environments, including high-speed data access to and from the CLARiiON disk array systems. DSS environments are important in all industries where large quantities of data must be maintained, consolidated, cross-referenced and retrieved. Data warehousing offers competitive advantages to forward-thinking IT organizations who apply the technology to drive critical business decisions. CLARiiON disk subsystems provide the high performance and data availability required by commercial applications through RAID 5 disk striping supported by flexible read/write caching. RAID 5 technology realized a 45 percent reduction in the amount of disk storage (a 2 terabyte reduction) needed to achieve the same level of availability offered by disk mirroring technology, also known as RAID 1.