Teradata creates elite club for petabyte-plus data warehouse customers

Computerworld - Teradata Corp. took its second step in two days to reaffirm itself as king of the data warehousing mountain, as it announced five customers running data warehouses larger than a petabyte in size.

At its Partners conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, the Miamisburg, Ohio-based vendor said the five members of its newly created "Petabyte Power Players" club include eBay, with 5 petabytes of data; Wal-Mart Stores, which has 2.5 petabytes; Bank of America, which is storing 1.5 petabytes; Dell, which has a 1 petabyte data warehouse; and a final bank, with a 1.4 petabyte data warehouse that chief marketing officer Darryl McDonald said he couldn't name yet.

McDonald said the club should grow quickly as Teradata convinces other petabyte-plus enterprises to come forward. However, the many rumored government and military customers that use Teradata will remain publicity-shy, he said.

Most of the customers have been using Teradata for at least half a decade. Take eBay Inc., which started in 2002 with a single 14TB system. Today, it processes 50 petabytes of information each day while adding 40TB of auction and purchase data. Not only is the data warehouse large, it is speedy, with eBay doing real-time analytics alongside less timely data mining efforts, McDonald said.

Listing Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is also a reaffirmation of a customer relationship that appeared to be under threat. Last August, Hewlett-Packard Co. announced that Wal-Mart would buy HP's new Neoview data warehouse appliance to analyze data collected from its 4,000 retail stores. HP also planned to take over some functions that otherwise would have gone to Teradata.

Teradata has another 35 customers whose Teradata systems exceed 100TB. Some of the figures above include more than just the original user data, McDonald acknowledged, and they may include duplicate data kept by companies for backup purposes or for fast retrieval.