“How often do you get to cut costs and do something better?” asks Scott Gnau, chief development officer for Teradata R&D.
Gnau led a recent project that consolidated 319 aging servers onto a private cloud based on the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series. Gnau says the project saves enough energy to run more than 200 homes—and enough money to pay for itself within one year. The project also helped Teradata earn an energy incentive rebate of USD 250,000 from its local utility company, and enables Gnau’s IT team to better serve its internal customers.

When Doing Right Is Good for Profits

Teradata aims to make the world a smarter place, developing tools that help
organizations convert massive quantities of data into breakthrough insights
and rapid responses. Teradata raises intelligence and delivers enterprise agility through database software, enterprise data warehousing, data warehouse appliances, consulting, and enterprise analytics.

Teradata also seeks to create a more socially and environmentally responsible world, through both its example and its products. “As a newly independent company, we streamlined our code of conduct to basically one easy-toremember sentence: Do the right thing, all the time,” Gnau recalls.

Teradata earned an incentive rebate designed to reward companies that reduce energy consumption.

Spotlight on Teradata CorporationTeradata Corporation, formerly a division of NCR, became an independent company in 2007. Establishing itself in a challenging economic climate, Teradata achieved 2009 sales of USD 1.709 billion and built a diversified base of over 900 customers worldwide. Company headquarters are in Miamisburg, Ohio, and Teradata R&D is located in Rancho Bernardo, California.

For Teradata, the right thing includes an aggressive plan to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent over five years. Teradata also offers a range of energy-efficient products, including its Intel Xeon processor-based Teradata Purpose-Built Platform* Family, which cuts its customers’ energy requirements for data warehousing by 60 percent.¹

Teradata’s efforts to be green and ethical have delivered practical payback whileburnishing the brand. The company has been honored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Climate Leaders program for its green leadership, and Ethisphere Institute ranks it as one of the world’s most ethical companies.²

With the private cloud, Teradata’s commitment also provides a clear benefit
to the company’s bottom line. Powered by the energy-efficient performance of the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, the internal cloud delivers a one-year return on investment (ROI) and helped the company qualify for an energy incentive credit of USD 250,000 from San Diego Gas & Electric Company. “This is clearly a case where doing the right thing is good for the bottom line,” says Gnau.

Performance and Agility for Business-Critical Innovation

Teradata had virtualized much of its infrastructure, but its R&D test environment was still running on singlecore Intel® technologies. Gnau’s team retired those old servers, using VMware vSphere* 4 to consolidate their workloads at a rate of 14:1 onto servers based on the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series. VMware vSphere* 4 makes extensive use of Intel® Virtualization Technology3 (Intel® VT) to reduce virtualization overhead and increase performance. VMware’s Enhanced VMotion* uses Intel® Virtualization Technology FlexMigration (Intel® VT FlexMigration) to move virtual machines (VMs) smoothly between different generations of the Intel Xeon processor—a capability that will enhance flexibility as Teradata expands its cloud.
The company plans to add Intel® Xeon® processor 5600 series-based servers as additional capacity is needed.

The decision to use the Intel Xeon processors is an easy one, according to
Gnau. “Intel is the leader,” he says. “The other companies are doing good stuff, but they tend to lag. Teradata is a leader as well, and we want the performance and capability advantages Intel gives us, for both our internal IT infrastructure and the solutions we bring our customers.”

Teradata’s leadership steps in part from its continuing ability to develop
game-changing innovations that help its customers turn data into insights and actions. In addition to saving millions of dollars and kilowatt-hours, Teradata’s internal cloud project provides a more powerful design lab for research teams to develop and test their ideas. Gnau says the new servers are more powerful, available, and responsive, and when R&D teams need more capacity, IT can provision new servers within minutes instead of hours. The net effect: highly paid researchers can work more productively, and are better positioned to keep Teradata and its customers ahead of the pack.

That’s definitely a smart investment.

Virtualization: Dynamic Resource Management. Optimize server utilization and increase agility through virtualization and dynamic policybased resource management.

Find a business solution that is right for your company. Contact your Intel
representative or visit the Reference Room at www.intel.com/references.

1. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Teradata-Makes-Impressive-prnews-2009894975.html?x=0&.v=1
2. 2010 World’s Most Ethical Companies, http://ethisphere.com/wme2010/
3.Intel® Virtualization Technology requires a computer system with an enabled Intel® processor, BIOS, virtual machine monitor (VMM), and, for some uses, certain platform software enabled for it. Functionality, performance, or other benefits will vary depending on hardware and software configurations and may require a BIOS update. Software applications may not be compatible with all operating systems. Please check with your application vendor.
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