This was just forwarded to me, thought it might be of interest.
PRODUCT REVIEW: HDS Nucleus Exploration Warehouse
MANUFACTURER:
Hitachi Data Systems
750 Central Expressway
Santa Clara, CA 95050
(408) 970-1000, (408) 727-8036 fax
www.hds.com/nucleus/
BACKGROUND: In support of the bank's mission to provide world class
customer service and support, First Citizens Bank deployed a data
warehouse to give its commercial bankers seamless access to total
customer relationship information.
PLATFORMS: The system at First Citizens Bank operates on a DEC Alpha
platform running Digital UNIX. The Nucleus Exploration Suite is
available for both 64-bit UNIX and 32-bit Windows NT platforms. A
"Personal Edition" is available for Windows 95 and Windows 98 platforms.
PROBLEM SOLVED: Eager to begin taking advantage of the technology, First
Citizens Bank sought to establish a mission-critical data warehouse. But
as in many real-world business environments, the circumstances were less
than optimal. The bank did not have a DBMS, a database administrator or
any DBMS experience in house at the inception of the project. The
company needed an outstanding "out-of-the-box" data warehouse solution
that could be implemented and administered by a single practitioner
after only one week of training. Using Nucleus, the logical data
modeling design required only two days, while creating the physical
model and supporting scripts took about one week. This seven-day effort
became even more exceptional considering that a single person who had no
database experience and who had other job responsibilities implemented
the entire Nucleus effort.
PRODUCT FUNCTIONALITY: HDS's Nucleus Exploration Warehouse fit the bill
for First Citizens Bank in two main respects. First, it facilitates the
integration of data from a number of incompatible systems into a unified
data warehouse environment for use by commercial bankers. Second, the
system allows First Citizen Bank's knowledge workers to manage clients
from a total customer relationship perspective by giving them access to
all the products and services that each individual customer may have
throughout the bank. Using token-based technology, Nucleus is capable of
high query performance while efficiently exploiting hardware, network
and human resources. First Citizens Bank is experiencing 25 percent
compression from its original "flat file" size while still maintaining
100 percent indexing, resulting in storage savings as well as quick
response to queries.
STRENGTHS: The use of Nucleus greatly simplifies the logical and
physical data design processes. With Nucleus, the transformation from a
logical to a physical model design is extremely simple with almost a
one-to-one correlation. The ease of modeling and implementation has
benefits that carry through to other aspects of the database
environment. The Nucleus technology effectively stores data in a manner
that allows query access against the data in its "compressed" form. This
facet of Nucleus, combined with the high performance of the database,
eliminates the need for aggregate tables to answer the detailed
questions that the bank requires.
WEAKNESSES: For extremely large data sets, Nucleus's load speed of 1.5GB
per hour (due to Nucleus's inherent data compression this can be viewed
as equivalent to other products at up to 4.5GB per hour) may be a
limitation. The rate of speed is due to the product's comprehensive
indexing and "tokenizing" of data the features that provide for
storage reduction and true ad hoc query capabilities.
SELECTION CRITERIA: The bank selected Nucleus because its out-of-the-box
data warehousing capabilities eliminated the need to staff a UNIX group
or to hire a DBA.
DELIVERABLES: Thanks to Nucleus, commercial bankers at First Citizens
Bank can, for the first time, use total relationship information to
develop business and manage their portfolios. In the past, bankers would
have had to consult as many as seven different systems for similar
information. This single, seamless data warehouse is a vital tool in
First Citizen's quest to provide world-class service to its commercial
customers.
VENDOR SUPPORT: The HDS Nucleus personnel are seasoned professionals who
gave the bank a capable combination of hardware, software and support
services. They came on site for the deployment, plugged in as necessary,
transferred considerable knowledge to bank staff and have been
responsive on the very few occasions the bank called on them.
DOCUMENTATION: The documentation could be more complete and accurate; on
the other hand, any limitations it may have did not prevent the bank
from doing everything it wanted to.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mike Walley, vice president of Systems Management for First Citizens
Bank.
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