Teradata’s Petabyte Power Players
As previously hinted, Teradata has now announced 4 of the 5 members of its “Petabyte Power Players” club. These are enterprises with 1+ petabyte of data on Teradata equipment. As is commonly the case when Teradata discusses such figures, there’s some confusion as to how they’re actually counting. But as best I can tell, Teradata is counting:
- True user data (as opposed to spinning disk or whatever). I believe this part because I asked multiple times and got a consistent answer, and also because elsewhere in its presentations Teradata drew a clear distinction between user data and spinning disk.
- All systems the user has, including for redundancy, test, development, whatever. I believe this part because it’s what Eric Lai quoted Darryl MacDonald as saying in an article I can’t now find, and also because Oliver Ratzesberger of eBay put up slides suggesting he has two different 2+ TB Teradata systems, but no 5 TB one.
Teradata’s five Petabyte Power Players are:
- eBay, listed with 5 petabytes. Note: eBay is also the largest, multi-petabyte customer for one of the smaller data warehouse DBMS/appliance vendors, but that system is just going in, and hence has yet to prove itself.
- Walmart, listed with 2.5 petabytes. Note: To the best of my knowledge – and no thanks to the friendly but uncommunicative Walmart representative at the conference — that’s an order of magnitude more data than HP Neoview is targeted to manage at Walmart.
- Bank of America, listed with 1.5.
- An unnamed financial services company, listed with 1.4 petabytes.
- Dell, listed with 1 petabyte. Note: Dell is one of the three known customers for another data warehouse DBMS/appliance vendor.
eBay got the most attention, giving several talks. eBay is relatively mum on the actual benefits of analytics (competitive advantage and all that), but Oliver Ratzesberger did share a few points:
- eBay heavily tests every aspect of its web sites, even tiny ones.
- However, personalization based on true real-time analytics isn’t practical.
- eBay’s direct marketing gets 20-30% more efficient every year, with analytics as the driver of that improvement.
- Applying analytics to eBay’s own operations, parallel efficiency over servers was increased from under 50% to over 80% in less than a year. The only server count figure Oliver disclosed was >10,000, but I suspect it’s actually well over that. So that was like getting 1000s or 10s of 1000s of free servers, with the associated floor space and (at least to some extent) power savings.
Oliver also said that eBay’s vendor partners might get access to the analytics at some point for their own use. A more overwrought version of the same statement may be found in the headline here.
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8 Responses to “Teradata’s Petabyte Power Players”
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[...] conservative kind of counting — single database, true user data, etc. Oracle estimates that Teradata Petabyte Power Player Dell would only be at 300 terabytes by this kind of [...]
What’s with the mutual link love between this story and the networkworld.com story?
[...] invest in analyzing existing hardware performance and tweaking their systems. Take for example eBay. eBay handles an enormous amount of data through many, many auctions running 24/7. Sure, with the [...]
Sajith,
Look real hard at the post metadata and you should be able to figure it out.
CAM
[...] fit into a Madison EDW environment. This idea — a version of which I’ve also heard from eBay in connection with its Teradata installation — says “OK, maybe it’s a good idea [...]
[...] did indeed disclose at TDWI that it was a large DATAllegro user, notwithstanding that Dell is a huge Teradata user as well. No doubt, Dell is gearing up to be a big user of Madison [...]
[...] Wal-Mart, Bank of America, another financial services company, and Dell also have very large Teradata databases. [...]
It is not really how much information you have stored within the purview of a datawarehouse appliance RDBMS, or how much information you can retrieve in a single query; it IS how much value you can render to the end business user/decision maker by virtue of the mechanics of your data warehouse appliance that is important, I think.
Now, let’s look back in time…when we had databases that were only about 200 odd Gigabytes big, and there were millions of customers, and the processors were not all that fast, we were able to still design some very “nifty” data bases that processed over 300 transactions per second.
Now, with all the inflated investments in technology and the accumulation of JUNK data stores, how much value REALLY is purveyed by the datawarehouse appliances? Think about it…
Victor