WhiteCross Launches The Latest Configuration Of Its New Data Exploration Server
WhiteCross Data Exploration has launched the latest configuration of its new WhiteCross Data Exploration Server (WX/DES). Customers have been using the system for large-scale analysis in areas like telecoms pricing analysis since spring of this year and WhiteCross has received further firm orders for systems both in Europe and USA.
The WX/DES is the latest evolution of the WhiteCross data exploration systems the WX/9000 range of servers, originally launched at the end of 1992. The WX/DES will be particularly beneficial as a dedicated data analysis engine for extremely high volume web traffic analysis for ISPs looking to solve the Internet data problem.
For every processor in a WX/DES, the system can analyse some 5 million rows of data every second. A system with 1 terabyte of capacity will analyse data at around 1 billion rows per second.
Chris Barfield, WhiteCross CEO, explains:
"The Exploration Server's performance has surpassed our expectations, and delighted our customers. Business people, especially in the telco and ISP arenas, are desperate for an analysis system that will allow them to interrogate the detail directly in the huge databases which characterise these enterprises. The demand is driven by the race to understand customer value and customer relationships with fine precision, and immediacy. The WhiteCross system is the only technology that really allows them to do that in a truly ad-hoc fashion."
Many large organisations have Enterprise Data Warehouses, or collections of datamarts, that provide a basis for consistent, reliable reporting on a regular basis. But in competitive, rapidly changing markets, companies must constantly deal with new threats or opportunities. Data warehouse systems to date have not delivered capabilities that are sufficiently flexible and responsive to identify them, and test possible actions. To do that, business analysts need immediate access to detail and need to explore it freely.
Summarised or sampled data is of no interest to them any pre-defined sample data pre-supposes at least the question, if not also the answer. The tools they use will include query products, and data mining software that is capable of operating on full volume data. Bill Inmon recently described the need for 'Exploration Warehouses' to fulfil the requirement. WhiteCross announced the world's first Exploration Warehouse with the WX/9000 in 1992; the WX/DES is the next generation.
"From the outset, our intention has been to allow business people to explore terabytes-sized databases directly and rapidly, yet more easily than any other DBMS," comments Bill Porter, Director of Marketing at WhiteCross. "Customer trials recently showed the WhiteCross Data Exploration Server loads faster and queries about 25 times faster than our nearest competitor. Just as importantly, we make the data available to the end-user more easily and more rapidly, without overloading the information systems department."
The main technical features of the system are: MPP, shared-nothing architecture, 'Load and go' analysis of data, with minimal structuring and pre-processing.
Database-in-memory software technology for maximum query performance. Every query operation is fully parallelised, utilising all available resources automatically.
Load operations are also in parallel, and scalable.
Externally the system appears as a standard RDBMS using ANSI SQL through ODBC.
Minimum configuration is 14 AMD K-6 processors, each with 512MB SDRAM (total 7GB), plus 108GB of disk array.
The system will scale to thousands of processors and terabytes of RAM and/or disk.
The interconnect is fully-switched high speed Ethernet.