Sun, Sybase create world's largest data warehouse

BANGALORE: Sun Microsystems and Sybase Inc. announced that they have created the largest, verified data warehouse in the world, according to an independent audit conducted by InfoSizing Inc. Larger data warehouses are becoming critical to enterprises that must store, track, and manage a growing volume of data to meet government compliance regulations.

The Sun and Sybase iForce Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) Reference Architecture - consisting of Sun Fire servers, Sun StorEdge storage sub-systems and Sybase IQ, enables customers to set up scalable data warehouses in days instead of months, while also minimizing storage costs, states a press release.

Using its patented data compression, Sybase IQ needed less than 55 terabytes on the Sun StorEdge storage sub-systems to store the 155 terabytes of input data, providing proof that Sybase IQ can reduce storage costs by up to 90 percent over competitors.

Additionally, support costs and data center footprint were lower when compared to conventional databases, which would require upto one petabyte (1,000 terabytes) of storage for this example. Sun's Chip Multi-threading (CMT) technology and Sybase IQ showed no slowing in query or data loading speed as query submission rates increased five fold, allowing companies to make split-second decisions as required by financial transactions.

According to the press release, with one trillion rows of data, the Sun and Sybase data warehouse can hold enough data to track the history of all world financial trades on all stock exchanges or hold enough data to track all credit (and debit) card transactions in the entire world over the last seven years.

According to Francois Raab, president, InfoSizing Inc., "The size of the iForce Enterprise Data Warehouse Reference Architecture is impressive, but size is only a part of the story. Organizations are faced with an exploding volume of enterprise data from online transactions to RFID transmissions. With the EDW Reference Architecture, they are not only able to scale for this volume, but are able to do so with a solution that can easily scale dynamically and reduces overall storage needs."