Teradata benchmarking facility expansion helps executives make better, more informed buying decisions

To help executives cut through the confusion and make better, more informed data warehouse buying decisions, Teradata, a division of NCR Corporation, represented exclusively in SA by National Data Systems (NDS), has announced the expansion of its 10-year-old San Diego benchmarking facility. The expansion creates new capacity for businesses to test the Teradata data warehouse and analytic applications in a demanding, real-world environment.

Like test-driving a car before buying, many businesses use benchmarking to test database capabilities as a part of the buying decision. Selection of the best database is critical to businesses that depend upon data warehouses and analytic applications to better serve consumers and, ultimately, power their corporate growth.

Before making any buying decisions, Forrester Research recommends that businesses thoroughly test software in customised benchmarking environments with their own real-world operational data, instead of relying on the industry standard benchmarks. Using customised, real-world benchmarks can help make sense of the many confusing vendor claims about the performance of data warehousing software.

"Any vendor can boast about their published industry benchmarking results; however, few can successfully compete when customer-specific benchmarks are used. These benchmarks are the true indicators of how a customer`s application will actually perform on a given platform," said Simon O` Hagan, general manager, Teradata Solutions Group at NDS.

"Teradata won 100% of the business in competitive customer-specific benchmarks during 2000. The tougher the tests, the better, because Teradata database has consistently achieved even higher performance levels against its competitors in these more demanding real-world benchmarks," said O`Hagan.

To perform a benchmark with Teradata database, a dedicated team works closely with the customer to tailor the entire testing process. Customers are encouraged to bring their own data to use in the testing, with some bringing more than 5TB of operational data.

With the data in hand, the customer provides the business questions, and the team develops queries to run against the database. In many cases, businesses have brought lists of queries to the benchmarking session that they have not yet been able to run on their current platform. In addition to using real-world data, the Teradata benchmarking team assembles the nodes, disks, tape drives and any other equipment required to create a customised system to fit the needs of the business.

Teradata encourages businesses to thoroughly test software and evaluate its ability to meet the company`s needs based on selected criteria, some of which include: manage large numbers of concurrent users, mixed workloads, ad hoc query performance, data modelling and analytics, ease of management, and overall speed and price.

As a part of the commitment to customers, the benchmarking centre also provides a range of services, such as capacity planning, testing of third-party software, help for businesses getting started with data mining and Web mining.

"Bull used the Teradata benchmark facility in San Diego in 2001 to demonstrate Teradata`s power to handle major increases in the data volume - from its original size to two times, four times and eight times larger than the original database. In every case we were able to prove that, with the prospective customer`s own complex and multi-user queries, the performance of the system would remain constant despite the increase in data volume. This prospect has since awarded the data warehouse project to Bull with the Teradata system over several other bids," said Floyd Mays, project director, Bull Worldwide Information Systems.

According to O` Hagan, customers are so satisfied with testing their company`s applications running on the Teradata system that some have requested that the test system be shipped "as is" to their site. In one instance, a new customer requested that a high speed T1 communication connection be established with their offices, so work could begin immediately.