Financial Services gain leverage from new data warehousing choices

The Challenge – Improving Business Decisions

Information analysis is the key to improving business decisions that increase revenue or reduce costs. Often analysis is as simple as knowing more about your customers and what services are important to them. For some financial institutions, a view of the customer may need rapid computations and aggregations to produce statistics such as their FICO score. Data analysis also allows for segmented, targeted marketing and cross selling, and helps identify product fit, new opportunities and historical trends.

In addition to providing a solid foundation for informed business decisions, the financial services data warehouse often manages credit risk and provides comprehensive fraud detection. Accuracy must satisfy compliance and regulatory requirements such as PCI, Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II and the Patriot Act.

To support analysis on a single enterprise-wide view of the customer and their spending, saving and investment patterns, data needs to be available at both a summary and detailed transaction level. This requires a data warehouse that offers both performance and scalability – a data warehouse with muscle.

Growing volumes of detailed transaction level data result in gaps in traditional data warehouse solutions. Return on investment with these solutions is limited, characterized by poor response times, reduced availability and data accessible only in summarized form. As a result, critical decisions rest on high-level data that may be out of date or are delayed by waiting for long running queries against detail level data.

The Solution – Flexible data warehousing with DATAllegro

DATAllegro data warehouse appliances enable financial services to query information at both detailed and aggregated levels. Flexible and cost-effective solutions exist for a wide range of data warehousing needs. DATAllegro provides rapid time to value for deployment of regional data marts, pre-aggregation engines for data warehouse loading, or a full enterprise data warehouse. DATAllegro Appliances also increase data warehouse capacity by offloading high-volume historical data from an existing enterprise data warehouse without disrupting normal processing. Whether it be to prevent costly upgrades to traditional data warehouse approaches or replace an enterprise data warehouse, DATAllegro delivers scalable solutions offering performance that is 10 to 100 times faster than traditional solutions.

The Benefits

High performance for critical intelligence at lower costs
One of our financial services customers uses DATAllegro to provide timely processing of complex credit scoring algorithms. DATAllegro reduced response times to 1/3 rd of the original time, resulting in execution in hours rather than days. By utilizing the DATAllegro appliance, the customer was able to avoid costly upgrades to the existing enterprise data warehouse. DATAllegro is the first appliance vendor to provide user defined functions that provide major functionality in calculating and aggregating credit scores.

DATAllegro v3 performs table scans between 0.5TB/minute and 10.5TB/minute. DATAllegro v3 offers new capabilities to handle complex workloads that are a mixture of near real-time loads, long analytical queries and short quick-hit queries. Improved workload management gives queries with low workloads higher priority, reducing the overall workload on the server. DATAllegro also provides a comprehensive architecture with a high-speed loader performing loads at rate of over 1TB/hour. The loading server or landing zone within the high-speed appliance network is used to provide a loading services with a minimal impact to queries being run.

Scale as Needed
As financial information balloons, DATAllegro v3 provides a range of data warehouse appliances that allow companies to scale up or scale out their data warehouse as needed. The Multi Rack Appliance (MRA) series provides even higher performance and the ability to scale your data warehouse from fifteen terabytes to one Petabyte (1,000 Terabytes) without forklift upgrades. Within a data rack, capacity can be instantly expanded for $15K per terabyte with a minimal impact to performance.

Access to data when needed
DATAllegro created a software technology to perform massive parallel processing using a redundant array of inexpensive data warehouses (RAIDW ™). The commodity devices in use in the RAIDW architecture offer high availability and enterprise-class reliability.

Simplicity and Sophistication to solve DW problems
Administration simplicity is only one aspect of the operational management of a data warehouse environment. As well as offering administration simplicity through automated storage management and appliance optimization, DATAllegro also provides the capabilities to solve complex problems. Data warehouses are commonly required to support enterprise and ad hoc reporting, aggregation, concurrent loading and mixed workloads. DATAllegro provides a unique blend of administration simplicity and flexibility to solve a wide range of business problems.

Protect your data with Encryption
In many organizations, the data warehouse is one of the largest databases in the enterprise and often contains large amounts of historical and sensitive information accessed by users in many locations.

DATAllegro is the first data warehouse appliance to provide encryption to ensure customer privacy. The hardware level encryption ensures data protection without significant impact on performance or size.