As briefly reported (CI No 3,072), Dayton, Ohio-based NCR Corp has won a $50m contract with Reuters Holdings Plc to supply the company with five WorldMark 5100M massively parallel processing servers. The new machines will be integrated with Reuters’ existing NCR boxes – the company already uses a number of 3600MPP servers. The machines, claimed to support up to 4,096 Intel processors, will be used for the data warehousing requirements of Reuters’ new 3000 Series information products for the equities, fixed income and money markets. Reuters says its total investment in the Series 3000 service, for which it has sold 9,000 access licenses since October, totals $100m. The 5100M servers combined with the 3600MPP machines, running NCR’s Teradata relational database management system and NCR Top End middleware, will form a 500Gb data warehouse, claimed to be valued at nearly $74m, and to be one of the largest in Europe. Information collected from a wide range of data sources world-wide forms the foundation of the warehouse, which provides information to corporate treasurers, investment managers and sales analysts. According to Reuters a big differentiator of its service from others’ is the ability for users to bring together on a single screen historical information and real-time prices and news. The new servers are to be installed at Reuters’ data center in London’s Docklands, and a second data center is being built in Geneva to provide back up and load sharing. A Reuters spokesperson said the sheer volume of company and financial data drove the requirement for a large integrated system rather than a number of smaller data marts, which the company also considered to be less proven technology.
