/ / Software Maker’s 64-Bit Analytic Engines Give Customers Better Performance, Scalability
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Professional Services
Customer Profile
Hyperion Solutions Corporation, located in Santa Clara, California, is the leading provider of business performance management software solutions.
Business Situation
Hyperion customers are analyzing increasingly larger sets of operational and financial data and need more memory and faster processing speeds to help them maximize performance.
Solution
Hyperion has developed new 64-bit versions of its Hyperion System 9 BI+ Essbase Analytics andHyperion System 9 BI+ Enterprise Analytics software that run on Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003 Datacenter Edition for Itanium-based Systems.
Benefits
Simple porting process
More memory
Better scalability
Increased performance / “The 64-bit technology helps our customers do things they simply couldn’t do before.”
Kevin Liao, Senior Manager, Software Engineering, Hyperion Solutions Corporation
Hyperion Solutions Corporation provides business performance management software for customers in a range of industries. The company’s Hyperion System™9 BI+™Essbase Analytics™ and Hyperion System 9 BI+ Enterprise Analytics™ products are multidimensional database management systems that help organizations to develop custom analytic applications that incorporate both financial and operational data. Hyperion customers increasingly demand faster load and calculation times, while retaining “speed of thought” presentation. To meet these needs and expand the breadth of applications supported, Hyperion developed new 64-bit versions of Essbase Analytics and Enterprise Analytics that run on Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003 Datacenter Editionfor Itanium-based Systems.Each supports larger memory addressability and delivers much better performance and scalability than the previous 32-bit versions.
Situation
Hyperion Solutions Corporation, based in Santa Clara, California, creates business performance management software and applications for its customers across all industries. The company’s flagship product offering is Hyperion System 9, which contains a comprehensive business intelligence platform, Hyperion System 9 BI+. Two key components of this platform are Hyperion System 9 BI+ Essbase Analytics (Essbase Analytics) and Hyperion System 9 BI+ Enterprise Analytics(Enterprise Analytics), solutions for developing custom analytic applications. They are multidimensional database management systems that executives, managers, and business analystsuse to analyze and report on their organizations’ past and current performance, as well as to model and forecast future performance.
Hyperion customers, ranging from global Fortune 100 organizations to regional mid-marketcompanies, use the Essbase Analytics 32-bit version to model and plan their businesses, analyze where financial and operational issues are, and evaluate scenarios that will help them take corrective action.
With rapidly increasing data volumes, many Hyperion customers have identified a need for increased memory and faster performance. As they came to understand the power and capabilities of Enterprise Analytics, they also wanted to create massive dimensions and load tens of millions of rows of data.
One high-tech manufacturer was looking to reduce its calculation windows to ensure timelier reporting and analysis, as well as provide access to greater volumes of data for richer, more accurate business planning. “A lot of our customers are taking on larger and larger datasets,” explains Kevin Liao, Senior Manager, Software Engineering, Hyperion. “Because of that, they are looking for ways to significantly reduce their load and calculation windows, as well as improve their application response times to help them handle the additional information in their databases.”
Also, many customers were requesting 64-bit versions of Essbase Analytics and Enterprise Analytics that could exploit the advantages of the 64-bit hardware platform.
Solution
To help meet customer demand, Hyperion introduced 64-bit versions of its Essbase Analytics and Enterprise Analytics software. The 64-bit versions, launched in late 2005, operate on computers powered by 64-bit Intel Itanium 2 processors that run the Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003 Datacenter Edition for Itanium-based Systems operating system.
These64-bit versions, targeted to large enterprises, can handle tens of thousands of concurrent users, while improving upon the performance customers have come to expect. Advanced compiler optimization takes advantage of the highly parallel processor architecture, thus helping most applications perform better out of the box when compared with 32-bit platforms.
Benefits
Developers of BI+ Essbase Analytics and BI+ Enterprise Analytics applications are able to rely on Microsoft products to cleanly port their applications to the 64-bit environment. As a result, users have access to more memory, better scalability, and increased performance. An aerospace customer of Hyperion, for example, reported that it is able to run 500 analytic databases of various sizes and complexity simultaneously on its 16-way HP Superdome running Windows 2003 Datacenter Edition for Itanium-based Systems.
Simple Porting Process
The development of the 64-bit versions of the Essbase Analytics and Enterprise Analyticssoftware was a simple process because the Hyperion development team used the Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 development system. “Specifically, we used the Visual Studio compiler to build on the 64-bit platform,” says Liao. “That really helped point us in the right direction, in terms of fine tuning the product.”
The process of porting the software from 32-bit to 64-bit took less than six months, says Liao. “We set up a 64-bit team that received training and started the process very quickly,” he says. After testing the software and running it in the 64-bit environment, the development team was able to make sure there were no porting issues. “We also wanted to make sure the performance was good and that we didn’t use too much memory,” he adds. “And we had to properly align the data structure with 64-bit architecture. We were able to do all of that quite easily.”
More Memory, Better Scalability
Because the 64-bit editions of Essbase Analytics and Enterprise Analytics use the power of 64-bit technology, customers can access more virtual memory than they could with the previous versions. In the previous versions, users could access only 2 gigabytes (GB) of memory. “With these versions, there’s really no limit to the memory,” says Liao.
Increased addressability enables various cache sizes to be set beyond 4 GB, increasing the likelihood of “in-memory databases” and improving performance for aggregations, data loads, calculations, and concurrent queries.
Increased Performance
The 64-bit versions of Essbase Analytics and Enterprise Analytics offer a huge increase in performance and scalability for Hyperion customers that are currently running the 32-bit editions.
“What we were striving for were hundreds of analytic databases running concurrently, supporting tens of thousands of users, with dimensions containing tens of millions of members—all delivering speed of thought response,” says John Brkopac, Director Technical Product Marketing, Hyperion. “Our customers are telling us that we succeeded.”
Performance gains of up to 300 percent have been seen by some customers, with most reporting 50 percent improvement. “When we first tested these versions, we discovered that they ran close to two times faster than the old versions,” says Liao. “The speed of data load and data aggregation give our customers the ability to greatly increase the amount of data they want to work with while reducing the actual time involved in analyzing the data.”
As a result, Hyperion customers can develop richer analytic applications across the organization, incorporating both financial and operational data to better understand their businesses. Alarge financial services customer wanted to provide the ease of use and analytic power required by a community of 4,000 users with varying skill levels and analysis needs. The company chose Hyperion. Says Liao, “The 64-bit technology helps our customers do things they simply couldn’t do before.”
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