RL Polk, an automotive industry market research and
intelligence firm, has rolled out grid computing based on Oracle
10g software to power its data warehouse and provide real-time
information.
The 500 million vehicle database runs on a Linux grid using four
dual-processor Xeon servers.
The company has been able to transform its data processing from a
batch to real-time environment since deploying the new system in
May. As a result, it has improved certain data processing tasks
from hours to minutes while increasing the amount of transactions
processed per second. RL Polk also hopes to reduce its technology
acquisition and maintenance costs.
Containing about three billion transactions, 500 million unique
vehicles, and 250 million unique households, the data warehouse
uses Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle
Clusterware, and Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g on four Dell
PowerEdge 6850 servers with Intel Xeon dual-core processors running
Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The grid automates previously manual processes, enhances system
availability and reduces their overall IT costs, the company
said.
“We’re in the information business and we’re forecasting an
exponential growth in the creation of vehicle data,” said Kevin
Vasconi, the company's CIO.
“To be truly competitive, to provide the kind of value our
customers want, and to drive the economic engine of our company, we
needed to move to a real-time paradigm. A lot of our information’s
value is in its currency – its timeliness. We rebuilt our company’s
core data engine on an Oracle 10g grid to better capture and then
deliver mission-critical knowledge to our customers as fast as
possible.”
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