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Sun Microsystems Outpaces NCR Teradata in Data Warehouse TCO Study
Saturday, 12 February 2005Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced that a study by Ventana Research found Sun outpaces NCR Teradata in delivering the best total cost of ownership (TCO) for enterprise-class terabyte data warehousing. The study found Sun outranked NCR Teradata in the categories most important to enterprises looking to build and maintain a terabyte- (TB) class business intelligence data warehouse (BIDW) infrastructure, including initial purchase price, upgrades, and maintenance, and costs associated with personnel, hardware and software.
The Sun BIDW platform offers a flexible and low-cost architecture and is deployed at more than 2000 customers worldwide. Some of the world's largest business intelligence data warehouse (BIDW) systems run on the Sun platform to achieve greater business agility and performance, while reducing overall operational costs. Thousands of worldwide customers rely on the seamless, scalable 64-bit Sun architecture to power their multi-terabyte class business intelligence (BI) networks.
In the study, Ventana Research used total cost of ownership as a tool to understand the full scope of data warehousing costs and how it can reduce budget surprises and mitigate risk. The study found Sun's terabyte data warehouse solution costs were substantially lower than NCR Teradata's. Sun's hardware and storage cost per TB was found to be less than half the price of NCR Teradata’s, and Sun posted an overall cost savings advantage that continued to improve over time.
The study concluded that the large gap in costs between Sun and NCR Teradata is due in part to the the flexibility and openness of the Sun architecture, which requires less expensive professional services, as there are more available resources for adding storage, CPUs and configuration of Sun-related systems than there are for NCR Teradata.
Key Findings
On Overall Cost: Sun delivered higher overall savings versus NCR Teradata for similar data warehouse configuration. The cost variance between Sun and NCR Teradata's was $2.3m for 2 TB, $4.2m for 4 TB and $12.2m for 10 TB.
On Storage: Sun had lower costs associated with storage. For instance, the study found the cost of 2 TB of data storage on the NCR Teradata system was more than $500K vs. only $182K for comparable data warehouse TB configuration on the Sun system.
On Upgrades: Sun provides a more cost-effective, low-risk method for adding storage and CPUs into its SMP-architected Sun server technology than NCR Teradata, with its massively parallel processing (MPP) approach.
On Professional Services: The study revealed that professional services offered by Sun, combined with Oracle, which provides the RDBMS software in the Sun system, typically costs less than 50% of the specialized resources for NCR.
The TCO calculations in this research encapsulate the majority of key factors and requirements for most data warehouse systems, according to the Ventana study. For the purposes of this research and analysis, Ventana Research categorized the relevant cost categories into three main groupings: hardware, software and personnel.
Hardware – The server hardware components include servers and any required interfaces, cables, adapters or other server-related options. Storage technology includes cabinets, racks, cables.
Hardware Configuration Sun NCR Teradata
Date Warehouse Size 2 TB 4 TB 10 TB 2 TB 4 TB 10 TB
Server E6900 E20K E25K 5380 5380 5380
CPU 12 20 44
Nodes 6 11 28
Storage 13.6 27.2 68 7.6 14.4 36.6
Software – The software components include operating system, backup software, monitoring and enterprises to support the data warehouse; in addition, NCR Teradata directly supplies the relational database management system (RDBMS), and Sun depends on its partners for the RDBMS (Oracle, in this situation).
Personnel – The personnel component of these configurations includes any external contractors and required employee labor to support the data warehouse.
About This Study
Ventana Research, a leading research and advisory services firm in data warehousing, business intelligence and performance management and Consensure, a leading business and economic case software and services company, conducted this research into data warehousing TCO to provide insight on the costs and cost variances between two large suppliers – Sun Microsystems and NCR Teradata. It was accomplished developing and applying a TCO model to identify software, hardware and personnel costs over time. This research provides direct insight into potential financial savings, but requires learning how to use the savings to reach maximum benefit in the organization.
About Sun's Business Intelligence Data Warehouse
Sun's offering for the BIDW industry builds on the enterprise-class, virtually unparalleled security and scalability of the industry's #1 UNIX(R) Operating System, Solaris(tm). This includes the Solaris platform on AMD Opteron, SPARC(R) and Intel processor-based systems, Sun StorEdge(TM) arrays, and spanning the Sun Java(TM) Enterprise System and Sun Java Desktop System.
Sun Microsystems also offers a comprehensive total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis to help plan budgets, forecast business benefits, and minimize deployment risks for architecting business intelligence data warehousing (BIDW). Sun offers a TCO Analysis, as well as a variety of BIDW offerings that leverage Sun’s BIDW best practices. The BIDW Workshop, Planning and Configuration, and Architecture Design services help leverage the findings of the TCO analysis, as well assessing existing skill sets and interoperability in the existing infrastructure.
Customers can engage with Sun for a BIDW Total Cost of Ownership analysis by contacting Sun at www.sun.com/bidw.
A copy of the Ventana Research study and additional Sun BIDW brochures are available on the World Wide Web at: http://www.sun.com/executives/iforce/bidw/index.html.
About Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer" -- has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://sun.com
Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Solaris, StorEdge, Java, and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries, exclusively licensed through X/Open Company, Ltd. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademark or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. in the US and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Source: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All trademarks and copyrighted information contained herein are the property of their respective owners.
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