Sun Microsystems today announced that a study by Ventana Research found Sun outpaces NCR Teradata in delivering the best total cost of ownership (TCO) for enterprise-class terabyte data warehousing. The study found Sun outranked NCR Teradata in the categories most important to enterprises looking to build and maintain a terabyte- (TB) class business intelligence data warehouse (BIDW) infrastructure, including initial purchase price, upgrades, and maintenance, and costs associated with personnel, hardware and software. The Sun BIDW platform offers a flexible and low-cost architecture and is deployed at more than 2000 customers worldwide. Some of the world's largest business intelligence data warehouse (BIDW) systems run on the Sun platform to achieve greater business agility and performance, while reducing overall operational costs. Thousands of worldwide customers rely on the seamless, scalable 64-bit Sun architecture to power their multi-terabyte class business intelligence (BI) networks. In the study, Ventana Research used total cost of ownership as a tool to understand the full scope of data warehousing costs and how it can reduce budget surprises and mitigate risk. The study found Sun's terabyte data warehouse solution costs were substantially lower than NCR Teradata's. Sun's hardware and storage cost per TB was found to be less than half the price of NCR Teradata's, and Sun posted an overall cost savings advantage that continued to improve over time. The study concluded that the large gap in costs between Sun and NCR Teradata is due in part to the flexibility and openness of the Sun architecture, which requires less expensive professional services, as there are more available resources for adding storage, CPUs and configuration of Sun-related systems than there are for NCR Teradata. Key Findings -- On Overall Cost: Sun delivered higher overall savings versus NCR Teradata for similar data warehouse configuration. The cost variance between Sun and NCR Teradata's was $2.3m for 2 TB, $4.2m for 4 TB and $12.2m for 10 TB. -- On Storage: Sun had lower costs associated with storage. For instance, the study found the cost of 2 TB of data storage on the NCR Teradata system was more than $500K vs. only $182K for comparable data warehouse TB configuration on the Sun system. -- On Upgrades: Sun provides a more cost-effective, low-risk method for adding storage and CPUs into its SMP-architected Sun server technology than NCR Teradata, with its massively parallel processing (MPP) approach. -- On Professional Services: The study revealed that professional services offered by Sun, combined with Oracle, which provides the RDBMS software in the Sun system, typically costs less than 50% of the specialized resources for NCR. The TCO calculations in this research encapsulate the majority of key factors and requirements for most data warehouse systems, according to the Ventana study. For the purposes of this research and analysis, Ventana Research categorized the relevant cost categories into three main groupings: hardware, software and personnel. Hardware -- The server hardware components include servers and any required interfaces, cables, adapters or other server-related options. Storage technology includes cabinets, racks, cables. Hardware Configurations Sun NCR Teradata Data Warehouse Size 2 TB 4 TB 10 TB 2 TB 4 TB 10 TB Server E6900 E20K E25K 5380 5380 5380 CPU 12 20 44 Nodes 6 11 28 Storage 13.6 27.2 68 7.6 14.4 36.6 Software -- The software components include operating system, backup software, monitoring and enterprises to support the data warehouse; in addition, NCR Teradata directly supplies the relational database management system (RDBMS), and Sun depends on its partners for the RDBMS (Oracle, in this situation). Personnel -- The personnel component of these configurations includes any external contractors and required employee labor to support the data warehouse.