Five Teradata Customers Have Data Warehousing Exceeding 1PB

Teradata Corporation announced that five customers now have data warehousing environments exceeding one petabyte, processing tens and hundreds of terabytes per day. This underscores the global growth of data across industries and indicates the enormity, power and complexity of the world’s largest commercial enterprise data warehouses.

"The Teradata ‘Petabyte Power Players’ now includes five customers of Teradata with petabyte-plus data warehousing environments," said Darryl McDonald, Teradata chief marketing officer. "Teradata is proud to work with customers who continue to push the envelope in size, power and speed. These customers embrace growth in data as an opportunity to find the next great information element to further their competitive advantage."

The first honorees receiving this recognition include an online auction company with 5.0 petabytes of data in their Teradata environment; a retailer with 2.5 petabytes; two large financial service institutions with 1.5 and 1.4 petabytes respectively, and a manufacturer with a one petabyte data warehouse environment. In addition, there are 35 Teradata customers with over one hundred terabytes in their Teradata systems, and that number is increasing continuously. As data volumes grow across industries, companies must build out infrastructures capable of scaling upward to accommodate the ongoing explosions of new information.

"The continuous lowering of storage costs is the fuel that businesses can leverage for profit," McDonald said. "Retailers are collecting consumer and inventory data to manage customer relationships and to optimize their supply chain. Manufacturers and transportation companies are also collecting more supply chain and logistics information to squeeze out inefficiencies. Financial institutions are obviously ramping up bigger risk management programs. And now, analyzing the vast amount of data in web clicks and trading ticks for operational and competitive advantage is becoming practical."

McDonald continued: "However, just storing petabytes of data won’t get companies the big prize — growing in their market faster than their competition. Teradata is unique in its ability to help companies make the most of all of their relevant data, by serving short operational queries to 10,000 users while simultaneously doing intense data mining number crunching and hundreds of complex reports — all from the same data. We’re the Swiss army knife of data management."

To illustrate the enormous processing power required of Teradata systems, note that in some cases, Teradata customer data warehouses manage:

• Database tables with up to one hundred billion rows of data
• Daily data loads of over three billion records
• Capture of 30 million customer transactions a day
• 1.5 million personalized consumer web offers per day
• A million database queries an hour
• 10,000 concurrent data warehouse users per day
• Operational query response times of 40-50 milliseconds

"What’s really compelling is that so many of our new customers do not select Teradata based solely on the colossal capacity of our high-speed scalable intelligence platforms," McDonald said. "They choose Teradata because of all vendors, Teradata delivers the parallel performance to make their jobs easier, no matter how complex the data or the analytic request."

As impressive as the petabyte numbers are, McDonald said that the numbers that matter most are the ROI figures — return on investment. For example, a large Teradata financial services customer reported ROI of 100 percent just four months after installation of the data warehouse, with 300 percent after the first year.

"What so many of our customers value about Teradata is the dramatic payback," McDonald said. "Call it ‘love at first byte’ for many new customers, yet for most, it is love at first sight of ROI, and it happens very quickly in most cases."

Asked if Teradata was ready to change the company name now that terabytes were becoming passé, Randy Lea, vice president of Teradata product marketing, responded: "No, we like our name and brand recognition," Lea said. "The name Teradata was chosen in 1979 — a testimony to the vision of the founders, now that most of our customers are managing terabytes of data. The vision is still the same — and ten years from now, who knows what the limits will be, but Teradata will stand ready to help companies manage their increasing data to get the most from their BI infrastructure."

The latest large platform, the Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse, scales to more than 10 petabytes of user data, supporting the complex data management workloads required for operational and strategic intelligence in active data warehouse environments.