Sagent sets new performance standard

Susan Andre2001

Sagent, a provider of enterprise business intelligence solutions, has announced that the company's recent performance benchmarks indicate that Sagent is the extraction, transformation and load (ETL) performance leader, and that the Sagent Data Flow Server scales linearly from four to 64 CPUs. This benchmark test demonstrates that the latest version of the Sagent Solution provides the level of performance that is required by customers with large databases and large user populations.

This is one of the reasons that Sagent Technology's South African operation counts Telkom, Credit Guarantee and Gensec as some of its clients, according to head of the local operation Susan Andre.
"The growing requirements for highly scalable data warehouses built on highly scalable parallel processing servers and database technology are beginning to mandate fully parallel and distributed ETL technology," said Rob Tholemeier, senior research analyst, Wells Fargo Van Kasper.

Based on an industry-standard benchmark, the Sagent Solution achieved a relational database load rate of 32.6MBps or 1.95GBpm on a 64 CPU Sun Solaris Enterprise 10000 machine.

At this speed, a Terabyte of data loads in 8.5 hours; a 100GB load completes in less than one hour; and a 10GB load in less than six minutes.

This rate represents performance over twice the speed as the best previously published industry results. Performance of this superior level is critical to data intensive industries such as telecom, insurance, healthcare, government and finance.

"Sagent's patented dataflow architecture was designed from the beginning to be massively parallel. This benchmark demonstrates the scalability advantage that we have continually delivered to our customers. The architectural advantage extends beyond the loading of large data sets to include the rapid processing and delivery of critical information," said Ken Gardner, chairman and founder, Sagent.

"In large scale data warehousing, faster is better. As data volumes grow and processing windows shrink, a parallel architecture offers the only technology solution."

Benchmark Logistics

Sagent and systems consultants at GE Access performed standard test suites against a Sun Enterprise 10000 Server with 64 CPUs using the Sagent 4.5i out-the-box software.

Sagent

Sagent's suite of enterprise Business Intelligence solutions enables companies to measurably impact their business by implementing highly successful customer relationship and financial management initiatives.

Through Sagent's powerful enabling technologies, organisations can easily and rapidly turn company data into relevant information that can be used for effective decision-making, analysis and reporting. Information can be extracted from multiple sources (internal and external), optimised for decision support and delivered in a customised format for Web-based or client applications.

More than 1 500 companies have selected Sagent software to enhance customer retention, cross-sell/up-sell, improve customer service, increase efficiencies of marketing campaigns, streamline business operations, analyse financials, and reduce costs.

Customers include AT&T, BP Amoco, Boeing Employees Credit Union, Bristol Meyers, British Telecom, California State Automobile Association, Citibank, GPU Energy, Kinecta Federal Credit Union, Johnson & Johnson (UK), Kemper National Insurance, Provident Central Credit Union, Safeway and Siemens. For more information, visit www.sagent.co.za