Unisys Corporation and SAS, a provider in business intelligence and analytics, has announced superior performance of Unisys ES7000 servers running SAS software, as proven by the first-ever hardware platform benchmark for SAS Enterprise ETL Server.

ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) is the foundation of BI, performing the resource-intensive heavy lifting for analytics and BI applications, which are only as effective as the information available in data warehouses and data marts.

For example, large financial institutions must access diverse data stores, update and manage growing amounts of data, perform updates more frequently with a smaller window of time, and cleanse and transform data into consistent intelligence. As all this data grows, the window of time to process it does not. Therefore, organizations need enough power to process larger amounts of data within very limited amounts of time.

"Unlike transactional processing environments, which are predictable and measurable by nature, business intelligence requirements are highly variable and unique to each organization, said Don Hatcher, vice president of the SAS Enterprise Excellence Center.

In evaluating and choosing the right enterprise intelligence platforms, it s essential to examine and optimize all aspects of the process for initial and long-term performance consistency. That s where these benchmarking results prove the most valuable, added Hatcher.

This benchmark is the first of its kind for SAS and will begin a series of benchmarks on all SAS platform hardware platforms.