SAND's ILM for Data Warehousing Solution Implemented by Atos Origin to Support (US)$7.8 Billion Rail Settlement Plan

SAND Technology (NASDAQ: SNDT), an innovator in analytic application infrastructure, today announced that Atos Origin, an international information technology services company, has deployed SAND Extensible Warehouse Suite, a product offering consisting of SAND Searchable Archive and SAND Analytic Server implemented together in accordance with SAND's Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) strategy for data warehousing, to manage a mission-critical data warehouse application for one of the world's largest transport settlement systems. The customer, the Rail Settlement Plan (RSP), is part of the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC) in the United Kingdom.

SAND Extensible Warehouse Suite enables Atos Origin to extend its hosted UK rail ticketing analytics service. The solution has already delivered significant benefits to RSP, most importantly as a practical alternative to a 14 terabyte archive. The more efficient 700 gigabyte SAND Searchable Archive implementation provides a fully visible and searchable data repository in one location, able to provide instant answers to queries, and a cost-effective strategy for adhering to regulatory guidelines and data retention policies.

Rail Settlement Plan (RSP) is formed by the 25 train operating companies in the UK, and is responsible for running outsourced IT service contracts for all rail tickets, information distribution, ticket issuing systems, revenue allocation and revenue settlement between train companies.

With a major area of business pain for the rail industry identified as revenue allocation and settlement between train companies, the task of polling, validating and apportioning each ticket sale transaction -- more than 1,000,000 each day -- to the relevant Train Operating Company, is not an enviable one.

The RSP chose Atos Origin to create a solution capable of handling and allocating more than US $7.8 billion in annual passenger revenue to Britain's passenger train operators. Atos Origin's solution was the LENNON (Latest Earnings Networked Nationally Over Night) Program. The system processes information from all UK train ticket sales. It then allocates daily revenues to each of the train operating companies within 24 hours of the ticket being purchased.

"We found that SAND Extensible Warehouse Suite was the natural choice for this project because, put simply, it allowed us to effectively archive, rapidly access and extensively analyze huge amounts of very complex data," said Mark Spear, Lennon Program Director, Atos Origin. "Furthermore, we have been impressed with how responsive SAND Technology are: from the outset of the project there was a real spirit of partnership and we worked together as one team to get the results we needed."

With allowances for backups to enable disaster recovery, the total data to be stored by Atos Origin was projected at 28 terabytes over a 15-year period. Atos Origin recognized that the traditional approach to data warehouse management would not adequately cope with the massive volumes of data that were accumulating apace, while still maintaining the required degree of service to users.

Atos Origin chose to deploy SAND's Extensible Warehouse Suite because it permitted them to leverage the strength of the existing data warehouse by freeing it from the need to support too much data and queries that are too complex for its design. Since typically less than 30% of the data in a warehouse is in active use, the inactive data can be more efficiently stored in SAND Searchable Archive, a highly compressed archival repository, reducing the warehouse footprint and enabling more cost-effective archiving of data.

Typically, SAND Searchable Archive can compress a data warehouse's data by 95 per cent, relieving the burden imposed by today's exponentially growing volumes of data. Complex analytics can be hosted on SAND Analytic Server, a high-performance multi-user platform that facilitates the development and deployment of complex online analytic applications, where the 'killer queries' will run more efficiently, sparing the warehouse from the performance penalties usually associated with them.

About SAND Searchable Archive(TM)

SAND Searchable Archive is a highly compact analytic repository that typically stores data in less than 10% of the space required by an equivalent relational data warehouse. Early production installations have yielded 80% - 90% compression of input data, which translates to at least 95% compression in comparison to a similar indexed relational database.

SAND Searchable Archive's read-only archive files can be searched using standard Business Intelligence tools and methods without the need to decompress the data first. In nearline applications, the selected data can be efficiently restored to the online warehouse or analytic server. In offline configurations, the selected data is queried in place without the need to restore it.

Users can configure the speed of data selection by adjusting the available server and storage resources, using less expensive media when storage cost is the underlying driver, and higher-performance resources, disc and servers when speed of data access is critical. Because the data access rate corresponds linearly with CPU usage, query speeds against the compressed files can approach or even exceed those achieved against the source warehouse.