Feature Story

A Winning Solution

Customers choose the Sun platform for some of the world’s largest and most demanding data warehouses.

12.Feb.04--Move over HP, IBM, and NCR/Teradata. A new winner is emerging as the platform of choice in the very large decision support arena: Sun Microsystems.

Last month, Sun took a number of top honors in the database survey results of Winter Corporation’s 2003 TopTen Program. Winter Corporation is a leading consulting company that surveys companies around the globe to identify the world’s largest and most heavily used databases. An underdog in the 2001 TopTen Program survey, Sun moved up dramatically in the rankings this year. Sun systems now support the winning databases in four of the five 2003 TopTen decision support database categories for all operating systems. We also now hold eleven of the top 42 spots across the DSS categories for all operating systems, including the following:

• #1 in the Number of Rows category, which measures the total number of rows in all tables in the database
   
  The AT&T database, with a half-trillion rows, is based on Sun systems and storage and AT&T’s Daytona database management system. This very large database has almost double the rows of the second-place category winner, which also relies on Sun systems, and more than triple the rows of the third-place database.
   
• #2 in the Number of Rows category
   
  The Nielsen Media Research database, with a quarter-trillion rows, leverages Sun's Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) Reference Architecture, which is based on the highly scalable Sybase IQ 12.5 analytical engine.
   
• #8 in the Number of Rows category
   
  A large Korean financial customer with almost 75 billion rows also relies on Sun's EDW Reference Architecture and Sybase IQ technology.
   
• #1 in the Normalized Data Volume category, which measures the total volume of data managed by the database system
   
  With 94.3 terabytes in normalized data volume, the aforementioned AT&T database manages 2.75 times more data than the second-place winner in this category.
   
• #9 and #10 in the Normalized Data Volume category
   
  Cho-Heung Bank, with 12.4 terabytes of user data, and another large Korean financial customer, with 12.3 terabytes of user data, use Sun's EDW Reference Architecture and Sybase IQ for their large data warehouses.
   
• #1 in the Peak Workload category, which measures the database’s peak concurrent queries
   
  The Experian Marketing Services database relies on Sun systems and Oracle to handle an exceptional peak workload of 887 concurrent queries.
   
• #1 and #2 in the Hybrid Database Size category, which measures the total volume of user data stored on multitiered storage systems that include both disk and tape
   
  Sun servers and storage support the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center’s mammoth 828TB Objectivity hybrid database as well as the UK Meteorological Office’s 184TB FileTek hybrid database.
   
• #2 and #7 in the Database Size category, which measures the total disk storage used for user tables, indices, and aggregates
   
  In the 2001 TopTen survey, Sun servers supported the ninth largest DSS implementation. In the 2003 survey results, Sun shot up the rankings, supporting both the second-largest 26TB AT&T database and the seventh-largest 12TB database of an online marketing customer.

"Our rapid climb up Winter Corporation’s TopTen rankings is spectacular, with this year’s results proving that Sun is the winning platform for very large data warehouses," said Steve Campbell, vice president of Enterprise Systems Products at Sun. "These gains clearly demonstrate the architectural successes achieved through our Reference Architecture program and collaboration with such iForce partners as Oracle and Sybase in demanding business environments."

Sun Reference Architectures provide proof-of-concept architectures that help you overcome the challenges of evaluating and building complex, multitiered environments that include products from multiple vendors. Designed, tested, sized, and documented, Sun Reference Architectures define the hardware and software components needed to build end-to-end solutions that meet specific business needs, helping you reduce the cost, complexity, and risk associated with designing and deploying new enterprise technologies.

Sun’s Enterprise Data Warehouse Reference Architecture, which was leveraged by a number of the TopTen Program winners, addresses today’s crucial enterprise requirement of collecting, storing, and analyzing enormous amounts of data from multiple sources in near real time to identify and rapidly respond to business trends. By providing a proven solution for implementing small to very large data warehouses--from tens of gigabytes to tens of terabytes of data--the Enterprise Data Warehouse Reference Architecture can help you deploy a data warehouse in record time and within a reasonable budget.

Sun teamed with Sybase to develop the Reference Architecture, combining highly scalable SPARC, Solaris, and Sybase IQ technologies to enable customers to efficiently analyze data sets that were previously beyond the capacity of conventional data warehouse implementations. You can see the Reference Architecture at work at a Sun iForce[sm] Ready Center, test your specific workload requirements on the proof-of-concept implementation, and tailor the solution to your unique needs. This real-world, simplified approach to data warehousing allows you to make more informed architectural decisions while saving time and costly architecture design evaluations. In fact, Sun’s Enterprise Data Warehouse Reference Architecture decreases installation time by as much as 80 percent, requires up to 75 percent less storage, and delivers up to 1000 times the query speed.

"The proof-of-concept demonstration put together in Sun’s iForce Center gave us the ability to see for ourselves how effective the Sybase-Sun solution would be for our company," noted Kim Ross, CIO of Nielsen Media Research, whose database was identified as having the second greatest number of rows worldwide in the 2003 TopTen survey. "It also demonstrates the critical aspects of ease of deployment, performance, scalability, and storage cost economy."

By continually improving our DSS offerings, Sun has gained the trust of our customers. We provide a highly dependable computing environment with valuable features such as auto diagnosis and recovery, full hardware redundancy, hot-swap of key components, and rock-solid security. Innovative management features, including fault-isolated Dynamic System Domains and our "one-touch" N1 Grid Service Provisioning System, also help simplify management of large-scale, mission-critical applications and projects such as data warehousing.

Already, our market-leading price/performance, storage efficiency, scalability, and manageability are driving customers to select our platform for their very large data warehouse implementations, as demonstrated by the 2003 TopTen Program results. Next month, we will unveil an enhanced New Enterprise Data Warehouse Reference Architecture that will raise the bar even higher.

The race is on for a trillion rows and 100-plus terabytes of data. And we plan to keep on winning.

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