May 13, 2004
Caudwell Puts Power Behind
Its Data Warehouse Strategy
After a reviewing a series of data warehouse
tools to help it analyze a staggering amount of call records,
U.K.-based Caudwell Communications initiated a data warehouse
strategy designed to architecturally integrate its database, server
and storage into a single appliance.
Caudwell Communications is a major player in the Carrier
Preselect (CPS) market, reselling telecom capacity it buys from big
providers' networks. The market was formed as a result of European
Union directives to break up the continent's large, state-run
telephone monolopies.
Caudwell deployed a data warehouse appliance from Netezza that
includes an unmodified HP two-way server, proprietary Netezza
database software and 114 separate IBM standard 40Gb disk drives
designed to yield quick response times without prearranging data
records or generating data cubes. Caudwell uses Business Objects for
ad hoc reporting, and is in the process of deciding on an analytical
tool to work in conjunction with the Linux-based warehouse.
The Netezza system won out over a series of more traditional data
warehouse contenders and software-based tools that either couldn't
hold company's full set of call records, showed inadequate load
performance or cost more than Caudwell was ready to pay, said
Caudwell data center manager Steve Morgan.
Mandate-driven changes in the CPS market landscape have helped
boost Caudwell's customer base 50-fold in the last 18 months, and
the company currently has 1.2 billion call records stored on the
Netezza system. Nine months ago, when Caudwell was still in its
first year of business as a unit of parent company the Caudwell
Group, it found it could quickly mine and segment no more than 60 to
90 days of calls on Oracle Unix and SQL Server-based database
technologies, Morgan said.
Morgan's team subsequently found a Teradata data warehouse tool
that could handle the necessary volume, but Caudwell ruled out the
technology on cost. A software-based tool from ClarityBlue had
adequate reporting performance, but generated inadequate load
speeds, Morgan said.
Morgan credited the Netezza tool's multiple disk drives with the
system's reporting speed. A handful of key reports whose generation
once required two or three Caudwell employees to work from 8 a.m. to
3 p.m. can now be pulled together in about half an hour, Morgan
said.
Caudwell stores all its call records -- or roughly two terabytes
of data -- on the Netezza system, which has a total capacity of 14
terabytes. Caudwell plans to either buy more capacity or run a
separate appliance in tandem with the first when its current
warehouse reaches full capacity.
The analytical technology will be key for Caudwell to achieve a
full return on its investment in the data warehouse, Morgan said. To
preserve the processing speed it gets from the new data warehouse,
Caudwell needs an analytical engine that effectively fires against
the Netezza system rather than pulling data from the warehouse and
analyzing it on its own.
"As a business, the real criticality for us is that when senior
management comes in, they can start making business decisions in the
morning rather than waiting until the afternoon," Morgan said.
