New Teradata Platform Reshapes Business Intelligence Industry
Hybrid storage innovations empower companies to make the best decisions possible
SAN DIEGO, March 8, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Teradata(NYSE: TDC), the leading analytic data solutions company, announced the immediate availability of the Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse Platform 6690 (Teradata Active EDW), which offers the newest generation of hybrid storage that further enhances the data warehouse's capability to help companies make the best decisions possible.
Teradata is the first vendor to provide customers with the optimized use of solid state drives (SSD) and hard disk drives (HDD), which is enabled by Teradata Virtual Storage(TM), its intelligent storage management software. The new hybrid storage-based platform meets a much broader range of customer analytic needs with expanded flexibility in the configuration and balance of SSD and HDD. The Teradata Active EDW supports robust strategic intelligence for long-range planning and reporting, and real-time operational intelligence for "front-line" employees.
"Businesses now demand real-time analytic solutions that provide the right answers at the right time - it's all about speed," said Scott Gnau, president, Teradata Labs, Teradata. "The Teradata Active EDW leverages multiple tiers of storage technology including main memory and both high-speed and high-capacity storage drives to achieve optimum data warehouse performance. It is clear that Teradata customers understand the value of this hybrid storage, based on an unprecedented rate of adoption by leading companies across many industries."
Customers in many different industries benefit from hybrid storage.
-- A manufacturer of high-value products is using a Teradata Active EDW
hybrid storage-based platform to quickly process data from a multitude
of sensors located at multiple sites, on their production lines. They
are able to significantly increase manufacturing yield with the
high-velocity collection and analysis of real- time sensor data from
fabrication machinery to make instant adjustments. These quick responses
optimize the overall production flow in an environment where every one
percent of yield improvement can mean millions of dollars in savings.
-- A large wireless phone service provider wants to increase the velocity
of intelligence about customers to support service agents' decisions.
With this information, agents can reduce churn, lower costs, and
increase revenue. Its hybrid storage- based Teradata Active EDW enables
all of these benefits by analyzing the current hot data from customer
interactions along with the cold data from the long-term customer
history.
"Our research shows that organizations need frequent access to their large scale databases, and a majority analyze the data many times a day," said David Menninger, vice president and research director, Ventana Research. "Given the performance and cost differences between solid state disks and conventional disk drives, a hybrid storage system that recognizes the usage pattern in the data optimizes the trade-offs, delivering the advantage of solid state performance for most operations while minimizing costs."
The enhanced Teradata Active EDW 6690 is differentiated by these key elements.
Breakthrough Hybrid Storage Technology
Teradata is the only data warehouse provider to offer integrated, self-managing storage combining both SSD and HDD devices in the same platform. Its fully automated approach makes the storage management transparent to the database administrator and user.
Teradata is the first in the market to deliver a database-aware storage management capability, Teradata Virtual Storage, which continuously and automatically places the most frequently used "hot" data on the fast SSD, and the least-used "cold" data on the slower, less expensive HDD storage. The data placement is dynamic and based on usage patterns. Teradata Virtual Storage automatically moves data as its temperature naturally changes over time ensuring alignment to the most appropriate storage location. The result is not only accelerated analysis of hot data due to the speed of SSD, but also the faster analysis of cold data due to the now lightened load for the HDD storage.
Proven Analytic Workhorse
The proven analytical workhorse of the world's leading companies, the Teradata Active EDW is the foundation for enterprise-class analytics. This system can manage the toughest, most demanding real-time workloads. It has been architected to handle both massive data volumes and data traveling at extreme velocity, while it scales from 100s to 1,000s of concurrent users and business applications. In addition, the system easily manages concurrent mixed workloads that include ad hoc, tactical, and basic reporting queries.
For example, a leading e-retailer uses the new Teradata platform to cost-effectively store a relatively small amount of hot data on SSD to meet the high-performance analytic need to create on-the-fly customized sales offers for consumers, while storing a much larger amount of colder historical data on HDD. The enhanced flexibility of the new platform enables customers to choose an optimized configuration to meet their individual needs.
The Teradata Active EDW supports systems starting at six terabytes (TB) and scales up to 60 petabytes (PB) of user data to support a wide range of data space needs. Teradata continues to provide an optimized and integrated hardware and software stack based on best-of-breed technologies. The technologies include the powerful Intel Xeon Multi-Core Processors, the robust, field-proven NetApp E-series storage system with the new, space-efficient 2½-inch-sized HDD, while SanDisk provides the industry's leading enterprise-class SSD with 400-gigabyte (GB) capacity in a 2½-inch unit.
Power to Enable Integrated Data Warehousing
The Teradata Active EDW provides an environment that enables integrated analytics with incredibly fast parallel processing, scalability for massive volumes of data, and rich in-database analytic capabilities. Teradata provides a comprehensive set of integrated analytics that leverage the speed of the database engine along with the cost-efficient performance of the hybrid storage platform. The analytics include data exploration, geospatial, temporal, predictive, and emerging open source technology such as "R." In addition, Teradata has collaborated with industry-leading data mining partners to provide analytics and business intelligence with highly optimized in-database integrations.
Powerful Analytical Ecosystems
Companies are building complete analytical ecosystems from their Teradata platforms, augmenting their Teradata Active EDW with one or more special purpose Teradata appliances. By doing so, they are creating a very efficient and powerful analytical ecosystem, which is optimized for price, performance, value, and system availability.
Unmatched Efficiency
Teradata has set the green standard in data warehousing - with up to a 10-times improvement in energy and space utilization for the same performance system compared to systems from six years ago. The enhanced Teradata Active EDW platform achieves data center efficiencies because hybrid storage delivers more performance with fewer storage units. Customers benefit from the innovative, high-density designs of the cabinet, power, and cooling. In addition, Teradata virtualizes all system resources for optimum utilization and green efficiencies. It is widely accepted that the costs for data center power, cooling, and floor space will soon outpace the cost of the equipment in the data center, so the sustainability benefits of the Teradata system have become a critical factor to the information technology industry.
Maximum Investment Protection
Teradata's architecture is unique in the industry, because it enables multiple generations of Teradata Active EDW nodes to coexist within the same system, allowing each generation to deliver full performance. Teradata customers can continue to grow and expand their current system for many years, unlike all other data warehouse vendors that require an entirely new system to take advantage of new hardware.
Versatility of Cloud-Based Data Warehousing
The Teradata Active EDW platform supports a private cloud environment through virtualized resources, scalability, elasticity, self-service business intelligence, and consistent performance. As a result, the platform offers a powerful, flexible, and high-performance cloud-based data-warehousing environment to accommodate ever-changing business needs. The data warehouse as a private cloud enables companies to cost-effectively consolidate their many disparate data marts and "sand-boxes" into a true integrated data warehouse.
About Teradata
Teradata Corporation (NYSE: TDC) is the world's leading analytic data solutions company, focused on integrated data warehousing, big data analytics, and business applications. Teradata's innovative products and services deliver data integration and business insight to empower organizations to make the best decisions possible for competitive advantage. Visit teradata.com for details.