Going Green with Orange

In February of 2011, I started the process of relocating with my family to the Sydney area from the US. It was a long process, cumulating with my eventual start with the Teradata PS team in August. I recall, during my discovery trip, watching a heated debate in parliament around the “Carbon Tax”, and, of course now this is just starting to be enacted and the implications being examined.

I am sure everyone has an opinion on this topic, and I have one of my own, but for this blog mine has a different slant: Go Green with Orange.

I have been with Teradata since 2000 and I have seen our technology take some huge leaps over that time. When I started using Teradata in 1995 with Bank of America, our platform was less than 2 terabytes and had a rating of about 40 T-Perf (A T-Perf is a unit of measurement for rating TD systems across multiple generations. The first generation had a T-Perf rating of 1 for 1 node). This system was in 20 cabinets on the data centre floor. A comparable system today wouldn’t even fill up 1 cabinet!

In 2010, we did a technology refresh for a customer using 5650 generation Active Enterprise Data Warehouse hardware. We reduced the floor space by half, power consumption and cooling requirements by over 60%, delivered 30% more computing power and 100% more storage. Our newest hardware, the 6690 class platform is rated at approximately 120 T-Perf per node and includes a mix of solid state disk as well as hard disk. It further drives a lower and cooling requirement per T-Perf.

Achieving more computing power, storage and lowering the cost to operate makes going green with Teradata orange an option worth considering. This is another factor to consider during capacity planning or when evaluating the depreciation schedule of the asset. Who knows, it may even help avoid the Carbon Tax!

John Berg