Every business must understand the needs of its customers, partners, and suppliers to build better relationships and increase profitability. This requires collecting, storing, and analyzing enormous amounts of data from a complex assortment of touch points throughout your organization.

Gone are the days when a few business analysts would write scripts to query a massive database, extracting information over weeks and months that could be used to make projections a year ahead of time. To meet the demands of e-business today, companies need to be able to access and analyze their business data to make split-second decisions that will affect product and service offerings, promotions, and pricing today.

That means business-critical sales, customer, and supply chain data must be instantly available to a wide variety of players within the organization, and to customers and business partners. The system must be user-friendly, it must scale to meet future business requirements, and it must be blazingly fast.

Sybase and Sun Microsystems have partnered to develop the iForce Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) Reference Architecture to streamline the design and deployment of large-scale data warehousing projects - powered by Sybase's Adaptive Server® IQ Multiplex? analytical database.

Sun and Sybase Reference Architecture Shatters Industry Records with World's Largest Data Warehouse

Click Here for Press Release!

Click Here for Fact Sheet!

Click Here for Quotes!

Click Here for Performance Audit Report!

Designed for Success

Using Sybase IQ Multiplex and Sun Enterprise servers and storage, the iForce Enterprise Data Warehouse Reference Architecture can offer your business the following benefits:

1. Reduce the complexity of building a very large data warehouse. The EDW Reference Architecture specifies all hardware, software, and connectivity components needed to build a complete data warehouse solution.

2. Enhance your chance of success. System components that are pre-tested, pre-integrated, and pre-configured offer a reduced risk when compared to standalone components from multiple third-party vendors. The actual complete test configuration is available to customers through Sun's iForce Ready Center lab in Menlo Park, CA. The lab can be used to test your specific workload before purchasing software and hardware.

3. Lower your total cost of ownership. Systems built to the Sun/Sybase EDW Reference Architecture are designed to lower the overhead associated with analyzing millions of data records. Squeeze more storage capacity, performance, and processing cycles from existing resources, and use sophisticated data management tools to ease administration costs. Total savings to Sun and Sybase customers by implementing this architecture-driven solution is over $1 million per terabyte of input data

4. Protect your investment. Because the EDW Reference Architecture includes detailed sizing and testing documentation, it allows customers to mix and match existing and new Sun servers, storage, and software.

Tools of the Trade

Data warehouses built to the Sun and Sybase EDW Reference Architecture can take advantage of best-of-breed technologies from Sybase and Sun to use compute and storage resources with a high degree of efficiency.

• Data compression shrinks input data to 30 to 80 percent of its original size. Compare that to traditional databases, which can explode data 3 to 10 times its original size due to indexes, summaries and aggregates.

• Innovative indexing lowers the overhead on query processing, helping enable faster response times (10 to 1,000 times faster) and more efficient data management.

• Column structure maximizes CPU efficiency and RAM resources.

• RAID 5 support keeps storage overhead to a minimum without sacrificing performance.

• Big disks reduce cabinet sizes to conserve floor space and take advantage of economies of scale to lower the cost per terabyte of capacity.

"The big advantage of the Reference Architecture work, done by Sun and Sybase, is that it provides the advance knowledge that this solution will work. It also demonstrates the critical aspects of ease of deployment, performance, scalability, and storage cost economy. The proof-of-concept demonstration put together in Sun's iForce Ready Center gave us the ability to see for ourselves how effective the Sybase-Sun solution would be for our company. Reference Architectures are a real boon to IT managers who are considering solutions for a specific business problem. For us, it has further validated our choice of Sybase IQ running on Sun servers for this project."
-Kim Ross
Chief Information Officer,
Nielsen Media Research

Click here to see what the independent auditor, analysts and IT directors are saying:

Read More!
iForce Enterprise Data Warehouse Reference Architecture Brochure
iForce Enterprise Data Warehouse Reference Architecture Introduction Press Release
Sun's Enterprise Data Warehouse Reference Architecture Web Page
"The Right Stuff" - Sybase Magazine First Quarter 2002
"Sybase and Sun Create Blueprint for High-Performance, Low-TCO Data Warehouses" - Sybase Magazine First Quarter 2002
Sun .com Feature Story - "Built to Perform: World's largest data warehouse was created from a Sun-tested framework designed to raise performance, lower risk, and speed deployment"
Performance Benchmark Report by InfoSizing, Inc.: Very Large Data Warehouse Performance Verification Report

Get Proof!
You're invited to a showcase of the technology in Sun's iForce Ready Center-a place for you to go that allows a hands-on, in-person experience to view and test your own workloads on this architecture. You can see for yourself how the Sybase-Sun architectural framework can help you reduce deployment time, simplify hardware and software procurement, and produce a higher return on your investment sooner. For further information, please contact us at infobi@sybase.com.