SAS, Sun Microsystems establish new data integration performance world record

Benchmarking tests demonstrate the superior ROI associated with cutting-edge ETL software

GENEVA (May 17, 2006) – SAS, the leader in business intelligence, and Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced a new world-record benchmark for the extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) of massive volumes of data into a data warehouse with the recently released SAS® Enterprise Data Integration Server solution. The results of these benchmarks revealed that the powerful SAS engine on Sun SPARC processor-based servers can outperform any other vendor’s tools by more than 250 percent in throughput testing, based on published results.

Using a Sun Microsystems Sun Fire™ E25K domainable server running UltraSPARC IV+ processors (dual-core CPU), the Solaris™ 10 operating system and Sun StorEdge™ SAM-FS/QFS shared file system, SAS demonstrated the performance of SAS Enterprise Data Integration Server when used for ETL through the completion of a test involving the throughput of 3.9 terabyte (trillion bytes) in one hour, representing 81.2 GB/Hour/CPU – a world record based on published benchmarks.

SAS’ capabilities for ETL are a key component of SAS Data Integration, which offers a comprehensive, universal data integration solution that includes technologies for connectivity and metadata, data cleansing and enrichment, ETL, migration and synchronization, data federation and master data management. These capabilities provide organizations with the flexibility, reliability and agility to respond quickly to new data integration requirements, consolidate vendors, standardize on one integration solution for both operational and business intelligence applications, and reduce the overall cost of data integration.

“Today’s organizations are struggling with ever-increasing amounts of data that cannot be extracted and loaded using the ETL technologies that have served them well in the past. As a result, many organizations are looking for ways to speed the ETL process, including buying more powerful hardware at great cost,” said Allan Russell, Senior Vice President of Strategy for SAS International. “This second benchmark on Sun hardware platforms offers an appealing alternative by demonstrating that SAS can prolong the life of an enterprise’s hardware now and also minimize the upgrades required in the future. If companies are considering addressing poor performance through hardware upgrades, this benchmark clearly shows that SAS has a lot to offer in keeping investment costs to the minimum.”

For more information, please visit the SAS Data Integration Website.

Today’s announcement was made at SAS Forum International, the largest enterprise BI conference outside the United States, attended by more than 2,000 business leaders, managers and IT professionals.

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