The significant benchmarks were achieved in large part due to the unique compression capability of Sybase IQ, a highly optimized analytics server not only for compression but also for query performance and lightning speed load performance. Sybase IQ demonstrated capability that allows organizations to easily future-proof their data warehouses and analytics systems using technology available today. The world's largest data warehouse depends on Sybase IQ's unique compression capability to store one petabyte of raw data including unstructured data (emails, documents and multimedia) using only 160 terabytes of storage. This huge savings in storage achieves a 90 percent reduction in CO2 emissions. Organizations using this architecture will be able to scale their data warehouses well beyond today's requirements at substantially lower storage costs, lower cooling requirements and lower energy costs than alternatives. Smaller data warehouses can also expect similar results.

Nearly 1,000 organizations use Sybase IQ analytics server to meet their demand for business intelligence, advanced analytics, predictive modeling, stringent regulation compliance and rapid reporting. The Sybase IQ analytics server allows users to aggregate immense data stores and accelerates analytics processing up to 100 times faster than traditional solutions.

Sun provided the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server, which features high performance dual-core SPARC64 VI processors and up to 2 TB memory, and the Sun StorageTek 6540 system that gave Alvion needed storage capacity and snapshot capabilities.

Results of the benchmark were audited and verified by InfoSizing, an independent third-party auditing firm. As noted in the report, "The Sun Data Warehouse Reference Architecture, powered by the Solaris 10 Operating System, a Sybase IQ analytics server and BMMsoft DataFusion on a Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server interconnected to three Sun StorageTek 6540 systems, demonstrated several significant achievements:

• It loaded 1 Petabyte of raw transactional data (6 Trillion stock quote records) in a fully indexed star schema; creating a new, independently verified record for the world's largest data warehouse.
• It reached a load speed of 285 billion rows per day (3 Million rows per second) and sustained that database population pace for a period of over 3 weeks.
• It showed an 85% data compression ratio by storing a Petabyte of raw transactional data in less than 260 Terabytes of actual disk space.
• It demonstrated an average Ready-Time of less than 2 seconds for data freshly added to the data warehouse.
• It replaced half of the "T" (Transactional) data with over 72 Terabytes of "EDM" (Emails, Documents and Multimedia) data, creating a data warehouse populated with 572 Terabytes of raw "EDMT" data.
• It showed a load speed of 26 Terabytes per day when populating the data warehouse with 185 million documents (emails, attachments and other unstructured documents.)
• It reached loading rates of 2 million emails per hour and 6 million documents per hour while consuming less than 7% of the available CPU power, leaving the other 93% of the SPARC Enterprise M9000 server CPUs available for Sybase IQ to respond to reporting and analytic queries.
• It demonstrated a substantial reduction in the number of disk drives needed for storage, translating directly into at least 90% reduction in CO2 emissions over the lifetime of the Sun Data Warehouse Reference Architecture with Solaris 10, Sybase IQ and BMMsoft DataFusion."

"The results of this benchmark show that Sybase IQ demonstrated its capability to handle real-world scenarios comparable to the transactions processed across the worldwide financial trading networks over multiple years," said Francois Raab, president, InfoSizing. "Sybase IQ has proven its reliability in handling the volume of multimedia documents representative of the electronic communication between half a million financial traders."

"Breaking these records shows that Sybase IQ is the correct choice for companies who expect significant growth in their data warehousing and analytics, particularly those looking to provide on-demand analytics to a large user community and advanced analytics applications where more data powers better answers," said Dr. Raj Nathan, chief marketing officer, Sybase. "Sybase's vision for an Unwired Enterprise requires that companies can remove all the limits. Information should be available anytime, anywhere."

"This benchmark is further proof that Sybase IQ is a good choice for analytics service providers," said Richard Winter, President, WinterCorp. "Sybase IQ provides good performance and scalability for ad hoc queries and analytics at an attractive price."