Enterprise software firm Sybase claimed this week that it is powering the world's largest 'green' data warehouse in conjunction with Sun Microsystems and BMMSoft.

Significant benchmarks were achieved in large part due to the compression capability of Sybase IQ.

Sybase IQ has the capability to store one petabyte of raw data, including unstructured data such as emails, documents and multimedia, using only 160TB of storage.

The savings in storage offer a 90 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions, according to Sybase.

This allows organisations to scale data warehouses well beyond today's requirements at substantially lower storage costs, cooling requirements and energy costs than alternatives.

Sun provided its Sun Sparc Enterprise M9000 server for the data warehouse, which features high performance dual-core Sparc64 VI processors and up to 2TB memory.

During testing, the system loaded 1PB of raw transactional data, in this case six trillion stock quote records, in a fully indexed star schema creating an independently verified record for the world's largest data warehouse.

It reached a load speed of 285 billion rows per day, or three million rows per second, and sustained that database population pace for over three weeks.

The system showed an 85 per cent data compression ratio by storing a petabyte of raw transactional data in less than 260TB of actual disk space.

It also demonstrated an average ready-time of less than two seconds for data freshly added to the warehouse.