Teradata RainStor Enriches Analytics With Archived Data

To respond to the rapidly changing enterprise requirements created by the rise of big data, Teradata Corp. launched RainStor version 7 for enterprise data archiving.

Available on Hadoop, RainStor is company’s archiving solution to meet the demanding customer requirements including strict regulatory compliance and the integrated analysis of historical data.

RainStor is an online, SQL-based, enterprise data archive solution, which reduces the footprint and costs of archiving, provides immutable storage, and helps meet regulatory, and compliance needs. It can store massive amounts of structured and semi-structured data from data warehouses, machines, other relational databases, or major data sources. RainStor provides a cost effective means of storing data in a minimal hardware footprint.

“By adding the Teradata RainStor archiving solution to their Teradata Unified Data Architecture, organizations can tap a rich source of archived data to support users’ advanced analytics,” said Dan Harrington, EVP, global consulting and cupport cervices, Teradata. “The Rainstor Archive solution supports advanced analytics with data previously stored on tapes, in ungoverned data lakes, or deleted because of a lack of storage.“

RainStor’s features and capabilities enable customers to store
and extract value from their archived data:

• Footprint – The archive compression technology reduces the storage footprint by as much as 10 to 40 times, depending on the type of data.

• Secured Data – RainStor provides an immutable storage model. Once saved, data cannot be changed, which provides a tamper-proof audit trail. New data or changed data is appended to a file, not replaced. In addition, RainStor offers security for access authorization, data lineage tracking, and encryption.

• Runs on Hadoop – RainStor provides an enterpise online data archiving solution of Hadoop. It runs natively on the Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS) on the company’s Appliance for Hadoop or commodity Hadoop clusters. In addition to Hadoop, RainStor is available on non-Hadoop platforms.

• Multiple Data Sources – In addition to the company’s Database, Rainstor can archive data from Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase IQ, and IBM Netezza. The ability to consolidate data from across the enterprise into a single archive saves money and improves analytics.

• Unified Data Architecture – Built to work within an organization’s analytical ecosystem, RainStor is deeply integrated with the Integrated Data Warehouse and supports QueryGrid. This enables customers to answer new business questions, while reducing overall costs and complexity.

• QueryGrid – Users no longer have to engage in multi-step processes when they want to analyze current and historical data by executing queries in multiple environments and doing extensive data movement. QueryGrid enables users to access data in RainStor from within their Teradata queries.

• RainStor FastConnect – Enables data to be moved at high speed from the company’s Integrated Data Warehouse to RainStor with minimal impact on the source system or moved back.

• RainStor FastForward – Moves and converts data stored on tapes to RainStor.

“With RainStor, Teradata has added an innovative data archiving offering that further expands the company’s data warehousing and Hadoop portfolio,” said Matt Aslett, research director, data platforms and analytics, 451 Research. “RainStor is designed to enable enterprises to take advantage of the cost benefits of data compression and de-duplication while ensuring that archived data can be queried, as if it were still in the database.“

Teradata Appliance for Hadoop

RainStor 7 flexible solutions
Based on the individual archiving needs of customers, RainStor can be deployed in any of these three flexible options:

• RainStor System Archive – The System Archive retains ‘glacial data’ or data that would normally be aged-out of a relational database to historical archive repositories, such as tape or disk. It is an enterprise archive solution with data governance, lineage, and auditing capabilities. It stores the data in the most efficient, scalable and secure manner, while maintaining full access to the data from the source system.

• RainStor Online Archive – The Online Archive solution is targeted for analytics on a deep historical data repository. It builds on RainStor System Archive features, but it provides accessibility with standard SQL through the RainStor query interface, and Hive or Pig if RainStor is deployed on Hadoop

• RainStor Regulatory Archive – The Regulatory Archive application provides the features of the Online Archive solution with added compliance capabilities. This solution is a fit for highly regulated data, such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) or the U.S. SEC (SEC).

RainStor is available, and RainStor 7 will be available in the third quarter of 2015.