By encouraging companies to consider the environmental impact of their technology investments when selecting data warehouse solutions, a leading provider of database software for business intelligence, Greenplum, is marking Earth Day this year. The company has also joined the Business Council on Climate Change (BC3), a partnership of San Francisco Bay Area businesses committed to reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Greenplum, by joining BC3 and signing on to the five Principles for Climate Leadership, has pledged to address GHG emissions throughout its operations and corporate culture.
Significant investments in data warehousing hardware are driven by the explosion of data in many industries, which in turn brings a cost to the environment: large data warehouse systems can consume significant amounts of power and require equally costly cooling resources. To enable users to squeeze a great deal of data into a small space, the Greenplum Database solution combines smart design with innovative, flexible hardware configurations. A Greenplum solution delivers the query speed and the extremely high data I/O rate demanded by the new generation of customers with enormous data sets, and also a lower footprint for the same amount of data as a competitive offering such as Teradata's data warehouse appliance.
While they could store and manage the same quantity of data using Greenplum Database with just seven racks, for example, during its vendor selection process, a very large internet service company determined that it would require 37 racks of a competitor's hardware to store their immense data set. Beyond the clear savings in hardware costs, this customer's Greenplum solution takes up less space, has lower power and cooling costs and is more environmentally friendly.
CEO of Greenplum, Bill Cook, said:
"With our standards-based technology running on commodity hardware, it is easier than ever for companies to invest in energy-efficient database solutions, which is good for the environment and good for the bottom line. Greenplum will continue to innovate in ways that further decrease energy usage and reduce the carbon footprint of our data warehousing solutions".
