Essbase OLAP Server Shatters BI Boundaries
Hyperion and IBM have unveiled breakthrough test results that show Hyperion Essbase OLAP Server, coupled with IBM DB2 Universal Database on the IBM Netfinity server, helps drive real-time business analysis for thousands of business analysts and managers accessing and analyzing billions of business transactions. This solution helps global organizations drive competitive advantage by gaining better business insights using a broad range of analytic applications in areas such as e-business, customer relationship management and enterprise performance management.
In tests at the new IBM Netfinity Teraplex Integration Center, Hyperion and IBM simulated a real-world demand management application based on one terabyte of data with an IBM DB2 Universal Database EEE on an IBM Netfinity server. In those tests, Hyperion Essbase OLAP Server, the market-leading open, cross-platform enterprise OLAP (online analytical processing) server, consistently delivered sub-second analytical queries against the application.
The data set used as the source for the Hyperion and IBM demonstration contains eight billion rows of transactional data. The average response time for the Hyperion and IBM test was 0.20 seconds per query. When the IBM Teraplex experts increased the number of concurrent users to 100, the average response time decreased to 0.0027 seconds per query. This demonstrates that thousands of real-life users can simultaneously access Hyperion Essbase with consistently fast performance. The tests also confirm that the combination of a data warehouse built on IBM DB2, with analytic applications built on Hyperion Essbase, allows customers to manage and integrate huge volumes of data and still deliver fast interaction, sophisticated analytics, and targeted applications to end-users.
"The results of this project prove Hyperion Essbase can scale in terabyte environments and improve performance on the Netfinity platform -- features that are integral to today's increasingly large e-business and business intelligence data warehouses," said Sandy Carter, director of Netfinity partnerships.
"Using the IBM Netfinity Teraplex Center, we clearly demonstrated that Hyperion Essbase scales to meet the requirements of the most demanding analytic applications," said Steve Fioretti, vice president of marketing for Hyperion. "No other analytic application vendor has been able to demonstrate the level of OLAP performance and scalability to support terabytes of data and thousands of users. These levels of performance and scalability are ideal for enterprise-scale analytic applications, including those designed to analyze massive volumes of Web data."
The test, audited by Lynx Consulting, marked the official opening of the Netfinity Teraplex Integration Center, IBM's fourth platform-specific Teraplex, which will continue the tradition of testing large-scale business intelligence environments. The Netfinity Teraplex Center is located in Raleigh, N.C., and features a 32-node Netfinity cluster with 8.7 terabytes of storage capable of supporting the most demanding business intelligence applications.
Representing an investment of $63 million, the IBM Teraplex Integration Centers allow IBM customers to stress test hardware and software to identify and resolve scalability and functionality issues in a controlled environment before business intelligence systems go into production on site. The Teraplex's proof-of-concept testing also ensures that IBM business intelligence hardware and software will integrate with products developed by IBM business partners.
In use today by more than 2,500 companies, Hyperion Essbase OLAP Server is a strategic analytical platform optimized for enterprise management reporting, analysis and planning applications. It supports multi-user read/write access, large-scale data capacity, robust analytical calculations, rich attribute analyses, and sophisticated OLAP queries and delivers it all in a web-centric architecture across multiple open hardware platforms. Hyperion Essbase provides intuitive multidimensional data navigation and consistent, rapid response times in network-centric computing environments. The world record holder for the fastest performance in the industry standard APB-1 OLAP benchmark, Hyperion Essbase delivers speed of thought response times to thousands of users, leveraging hundreds of analytic applications and analyzing hundreds of terabytes of information.
Hyperion Essbase allows corporations to deliver analytic applications directly from operational systems or within an overall enterprise data warehousing architecture. Analytic applications commonly implemented with Hyperion Essbase include e-Business Analytics, Enterprise Performance Management, CRM Analytics, Manufacturing Analytics, Demand Management Analytics, HRM Analytics and Industry Solutions. More than 300 Hyperion alliance partners, including Baan, IBM, Lawson Software, PeopleSoft, ShowCase and Walker, leverage Hyperion Essbase as a strategic enterprise OLAP platform for analytic applications.
The worldwide analytic application software leader, Hyperion Solutions Corporation (Nasdaq:HYSL) gives today's knowledge workers the "freedom to succeed" with software, services and partner offerings that help them understand and optimize their businesses. More than 6,000 organizations worldwide use Hyperion's analytic application software products, which include market-leading packaged analytic applications, and OLAP server technology and tools. Hyperion's customers include more than 60 of the Fortune 100 and more than 40 of the Financial Times European Top 100 companies. In addition, more than 300 leading data warehousing, OLAP tools, services, ERP, packaged application, and platform alliance partners extend the value of Hyperion's products and services to deliver maximum flexibility and choice to customers. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, the company has offices in 26 countries. Information on Hyperion's products and services is available at http://www.hyperion.com, info@hyperion.com, or 1-800-286-8000.
The Teraplex Integration Centers are open to IBM's customers and business partners for no charge and are equipped for testing of applications and products from multiple IBM divisions and from non-IBM vendors. A Center is designated for each IBM platform -- one each for S/390 and RS/6000, in Poughkeepsie. N.Y., and one for AS/400, in Rochester, Minn., in additon to the new center in Raleigh. More information about the Teraplex Integration Centers can be found at http://www.ibm.com/solutions/businessintelligence/teraplex/index.htm.
Netfinity servers are armor-plated with advanced technologies such as Light Path Diagnostics and "Chipkill" memory adopted from IBM's big iron heritage. The Netfinity X-Architecture provides a design blueprint for migrating these mainframe attributes to industry standard servers. Since 1998, Netfinity servers have set over 42 performance records including seven number-one benchmarks. Information on the Netfinity X-Architecture can be found at http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/netfinity/xarchitecture. Server performance information can be found at http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/techlink/srvperf.html.
As the foundation for e-business, IBM DB2 Universal Database is the industry's first multimedia, Web-ready relational database management system, strong enough to meet the demands of large corporations and flexible enough to serve medium-sized and small businesses. IBM DB2 Universal Database combines power for business intelligence (data warehousing and data mining) with industry-leading performance and reliability to drive the most demanding industry solutions. IBM DB2 Universal Database, together with Internet technology, makes information easily accessible, available and secure. With more than one million IBM DB2 server licenses and 40 million users, IBM is the marketshare leader in the worldwide database industry according to Dataquest Inc., a unit of GartnerGroup, Inc. More information on IBM data management can be found at http://www.software.ibm.com/data.