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Actian Vector: A High-Performance Path Away From Netezza for a Global Bank
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Database Management & Storage
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Databases
Applicable Industries
- Finance & Insurance
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Maintenance
Use Cases
- Asset Health Management (AHM)
- Asset Lifecycle Management
Services
- Data Science Services
- Hardware Design & Engineering Services
The Challenge
A large global bank was faced with a significant challenge when support for its analytics solution, Netezza Twinfin, ended. The bank needed a new analytics solution that would not only replace Netezza but also deliver deeper insights faster, scale with the bank's growth, and keep costs low while delivering high performance. The bank required a solution that would support a single data repository for all positions across all asset classes, facilitating ad hoc analysis of positions and their sensitivity to market factors. The bank also wanted a solution that could ingest, analyze, and act on massive volumes of both structured and unstructured data in short order. The bank had long desired deeper and more timely insights into its risk exposure, as Netezza provided risk and opportunity value analyses only once per day via batch data dump. The bank aimed for a solution that could deliver insights in sub-minute intervals throughout the day. Performance, scalability, reliability, and cost were also critical factors in the bank's decision.
About The Customer
The customer in this case study is a large global bank, one of the world’s largest financial institutions. It provides individuals, small- to mid-sized businesses, and large public, private, and governmental institutions with a full range of banking, investing, asset, and risk management services. The bank interacts with more than 50 million consumers and small businesses through its 5,000 retail banking offices and 16,000 ATMs. It also has about 30 million active online banking users and more than 15 million mobile users. The bank had been relying on Netezza Twinfin for its analytics solution for years before the support for Netezza ended.
The Solution
After a thorough review of numerous alternatives, the bank selected the Actian Vector Analytics Database and the Actian Data Platform™ to replace Netezza Twinfin. Actian Vector is a true column-store database that provides unrivaled abilities to connect, analyze, and act on big data. It turns even commodity hardware into a massively parallel high-performance data processing and real-time analytics solution capable of processing complex queries entirely in memory and returning actionable insights up to 30 times faster than competing solutions. The bank compared the performance of Actian Vector against Netezza Twinfin and found that Actian Vector, running on a compute cluster with only 5 nodes, performed on par with Netezza, which ran on a 24-node compute cluster. Actian Vector also outperformed its rivals in areas such as data compression, volume handling ability, load times, stress, and ad hoc query responses. The bank appreciated the flexibility and scalability ensured by Actian Vector, which runs on commodity hardware on top of Windows or Linux. Actian’s level of expertise and commitment to partnership also played a significant role in the bank's decision.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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