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, a highly scalable analytical engine -- enables customers to set up such highly scalable data warehouses in days instead of months, while also minimizing storage costs.

In addition, the companies are announcing joint customers that include Nielsen Media Research, American Airlines, Bank of Montreal, BizRate.com, Allianz Insurance, U.S. Department of Transportation, Telefonica, Samsung Card, Chohung Bank and LG Card.

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 dramatically 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 up to 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.

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.

To reduce the risk and associated costs with implementation and availability of the EDW Reference Architecture, customers can select from several Sun services offerings, such as Sun Preventive Services, Managed Services, and Highly Available service packs. Reference Architectures offer a tested way for customers to build important network computing infrastructures based on best practices.

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."

The impressive results of the new InfoSizing report, follow a pattern of industry recognition for Sun and Sybase IQ. These include:

-- Securing the top ten awards for decision support systems in Winter Corporations' latest Top Ten Program.

-- Leading the industry on the best price-performance ever published on the TPC-H benchmark at 100GB, 300GB and 1TB.

"Our data warehouse is by far one of the largest I've ever seen and it's going to grow considerably every year. This report increases my confidence that the hardware and technology [Sybase IQ and Sun] we have selected will be able to keep up with our demands as we grow it to the 30 terabyte level," said Timothy S. Geary, Data Resource Manager, Information Technology, National Product Group, Nielsen Media Research.