Teradata Analyzing Petabyte-Sized Data Volumes

Teradata Corporation announced the newest member of its ‘purpose-built’ platform family, the Teradata Extreme Data Appliance 1550, which enables customers to affordably extend their analytic reach into 50 petabytes or more of detailed behavioral and process data.

"The Teradata Extreme Data Appliance, with the full depth and breath of Teradata capabilities, enables customers to break down the cost barrier, which previously prevented access to the intelligence hidden within petabytes of data," said Scott Gnau, chief development officer, Teradata. "The digitalization of data and broad deployment of Internet and mobile consumer applications has created exploding volumes of data. Our customers knew that there was immense value in this data, but the volumes demanded a significant investment. Listening to our customers, Teradata has solved this problem. Teradata’s Extreme Data Appliance makes it affordable for business users to deploy analytics on petabytes of data starting at $16,500 per terabyte at U.S. list price. Customers will no longer have to settle for not getting insights from extremely large data volumes."

The Teradata Extreme Data Appliance is a purpose-built analytical platform positioned for a small group of users who have specialized analytics typically within a department. It enables these users to perform analysis on extreme volumes of data, previously regarded as impractical, from data sources such as website clickstream, regulatory multi-year compliance, manufacturing processing and testing, RFID-product movement and cell phone network usage.

Teradata takes the technology and cost/performance lead in the telecommunications data warehouse market. Customers can now collect, enrich and analyze massive volumes of call data records (CDR) and data detail records, at a fraction of the previous cost and with all of the power and maturity they expect from Teradata. The Teradata Extreme Data and CDR Appliance provides a low-cost, out-of-the-box system with full integration and analysis of all call routing activity including switch, pre-mediated and post-mediated voice and data records, without any limit in scalability.

This robust data warehouse for telecommunications carriers provides new insights at a level of granularity previously unthinkable, for use across the enterprise in areas such as network engineering and operations, finance, customer service, marketing, billing and fraud prevention. In addition to the 50-plus petabytes of user data utilizing existing Teradata compression technology, Teradata Labs is in alpha testing to deliver more than 20 times improvement in data compression.

The appliance includes a CDR-focused version of the market-leading Teradata Communication Logical Data Model, Teradata professional consulting services and the Teradata 12 database. In addition, Teradata works closely with partners’ data integration and business intelligence tools for loading data and business analytics.

Teradata is the first provider to make it affordable and possible for customers to get answers from petabytes of data to questions like the following through the deep analysis of extreme quantities of data. Why did a website visitor not buy a specific product? If 10 percent of the customers who visit a company’s website buy a product, what can we learn about the other 90 percent who may show a propensity to purchase the same product? This type of analysis has been considered too hard, too expensive and too complicated. However, by analyzing the behavioral ‘foot print traffic’ of customers’ website data, businesses can better understand which individuals may also have an interest in the product. These insights can have a real impact on corporate revenue.

• Engine manufacturers have not been able to capture and analyze the nearly one petabyte of engine test and maintenance data needed to enhance the performance and reliability of engines. During a typical 40-year life span, engines generate enormous volumes of data that offer insights into when the engine should receive maintenance or new parts, or when it should be taken out of service. Current analysis will be enhanced by looking at trends over a longer period of time.

In addition to solely performing analytics, the affordability of the Teradata Extreme Data Appliance makes it an excellent platform for the intelligent storage of archived data. Rather than storing it off line in an archival storage device, making retrieval cumbersome, this data can now be easily available for instant access at an affordable price.

• Global governmental compliance regulations are now requiring companies to provide records spanning seven years and beyond in a timely fashion. For example, the call traffic for a typical telecom firm’s network can result in over 100 terabytes of data yearly making compliance a challenge and expensive.

"Intel and Teradata have been working together to develop leading data warehouse products in the enterprise for well over two decades," said Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager, Intel’s Server Platforms Group. "We are pleased the Teradata architecture leverages the performance and energy efficiency of the quad-core Intel Xeon processor to provide world-class analytic capabilities to their customers."

The Teradata Extreme Data Appliance, based on the field-proven Teradata platform technologies, is an affordable, fully integrated, scalable platform with the quad-core Intel Xeon processor, industry-standard high-capacity storage, running on Novell SUSE Linux, and the market-leading Teradata 12 database and utilities. All components are pre-installed and the appliance is currently available.

The Teradata Extreme Data Appliance has the same energy-efficient architecture as the rest of the Teradata platform family and, with its high data-to-floor-space ratio, it reduces data center and operational costs.

The Teradata Extreme Data Appliance joins the growing Purpose-Built Teradata Platform Family, which includes the Teradata Data Mart Appliance, the Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance and the Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse. Leveraging the Teradata database, the Teradata Platform Family offers customers the ability to take advantage of the proven power of Teradata for all their analytical needs throughout their enterprise.