Product Innovation Drives Teradata’s Sustainability Goals

May 13, 2009

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Teradata Corporation, a datawarehousing and enterprise analytics company, has released its Corporate Social Responsibility Report that outlines its plan for sustainable business initiatives including product development. Over the last five product generations, Teradata says it has improved its total performance-per-watt (PPW) rating of its products by 182 percent.

To meet sustainability goals, the Miamisburg, Ohio-based company is focused on innovation in the design of data warehouse hardware and software, as well as the package and transport of product. It also follows through to how it works with suppliers, and how customers use its data warehouses and analytics.

Specifically in the area of product development, the company is focused on maximizing the power required for complex analytics, while minimizing the consumption of space and energy. As an example, the Teradata Purpose-Built Platform Family delivers energy and data center space savings, with power consumption and cooling requirements that are well below the industry average, says the company.

With the release of the Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse alone, in April 2008, PPW increased by 73 percent over the 5450 product. The Active Enterprise Data Warehouse provides customers with up to 78 percent reduction in electricity usage for the same capability data warehouse as compared to servers of five years prior. That’s enough kWhs saved by one typical system to power 50 U.S. homes for one year, according to the company.

In addition, Teradata switched to LCD monitors, which reduced shipping weight by 77 percent, shrunk packaging materials by 78 percent and delivered power savings of 60 percent. The door to the Teradata platform was replaced with a new cooling door designed to reduce the energy necessary to cool its components by 25 percent.

In 2008, the company moved to 40 percent total recycled and 25 percent post-consumer waste paper in its print-on-demand collateral and Teradata Customer Education catalog. This saved the following:

43 trees preserved for the future
126 lbs. water-borne waste prevented
18,580 gallons wastewater flow saved
2,056 lbs. solid waste prevented
4,048 lbs. net greenhouse gases prevented
31,994,402 BTUs of energy saved

Other key environmental sustainability highlights:

by moving to print-on-demand and electronic technical manuals, Teradata saw a 98 percent reduction in printed sheets for technical manuals from 11,000,000 (the equivalent of 1,005 trees) in 1999 to 230,000 (25 trees) in 2007
Joined the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Climate Leaders program in 2008
More than 24 percent of its employees work virtually
Installed video conferencing equipment at each facility, which saves 62,500 miles of travel and 23.8 metric tons of CO2 annually
Complies with the European Union Directive on the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (EU RoHS), which limits the use of certain substances, such as lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyls (PBBs) and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), in electrical and electronic products
Equipment decommissioning and recycling programs are compliant with international recycling legislation, such as the European Union Directive on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (EU WEEE) as well as other global e-waste laws,

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Reader Comments

This is excellent to hear how focused they are on products and internal sustainability, hats off. I think there is a bigger story if you look at how customers are using their products to improve their own efficiencies impacting overall sustainability exponentially. Many of their customers are saving millions of gallons of fuel and reducing energy consumption by working smarter with Teradata products. Looking at it through this lense, the impact potential is much larger than the efforts mentioned in this article.

Brent Quebman | May 20th, 2009