Teradata Data Warehouse Platform With SSDs From Pliant

Teradata Corporation announced two Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse (Active EDW) platforms for making smarter decisions at hyper speeds. The platforms are the latest innovations from Teradata Labs and are the first to combine solid state drive (SSD) and hard disk drive (HDD) technology with the intelligent virtual storage solution that automatically migrates data between drive types to achieve optimum performance.

    
  Teradata Active EDW 6680
Platform Cabinet Components
 
The new Teradata platforms provide enterprise class analytics, with options to manage storage performance optimized to meet a company’s needs. The Active EDW 6680 is delivered with SSD and HDD storage along with the Teradata Virtual Storage (TVS) solution, which automatically tracks the usage of data, and then migrates it to the appropriate storage type. The Active EDW 6650 utilizes HDD storage and is ready for future upgrade to SSDs and Teradata Virtual Storage.

The Active EDW 6680 delivers up to a 75 percent lower energy cost for same performance over the previous model along with a 75 percent smaller data center footprint. The Active EDW 6650 offers a 25 percent lower energy cost for same capacity over the previous model and a 25 percent smaller data center footprint.

The new Active EDW platforms achieve these data center efficiencies through the scalability of the Teradata database architecture, the designs of the Teradata cabinet packaging, power, and cooling.

"The Active EDW 6680 offers up to a 4 times boost in throughput and unleashes performance for reporting, operations, and complex analytic applications helping customers do more, do it faster and do it better," said Scott Gnau, chief development officer, Teradata Corporation. "Teradata is the only vendor to offer integrated, self-managing storage combining both SSD and HDD devices in the same platform. Also, by combining large memory and efficient caching, Teradata provides in-memory performance without requiring a separate appliance."

Teradata Virtual Storage
Teradata idelivers virtual storage functionality which continuously and automatically places the most frequently used hot data on the fastest, solid state storage and the least used cold data on the slowest storage without user or administrator intervention. Usage of data changes as it ages naturally creating changes to data temperature. TVS automatically moves data as temperature changes ensuring alignment to the most appropriate storage location. Teradata supplies a monitoring tool that helps customers know exactly how much of their data is hot so they can purchase exactly the right number of SSDs for their needs.  

"Teradata Virtual Storage helps the customer get high performance on the data that is used the most and lower cost on data used less frequently, without the customer having to manage data placement," said Richard Winter, president, WinterCorp. "In addition, the much higher performance of solid state drives makes it possible for the customer to exploit the higher processing power of today’s architectures for intensive analytics and active data warehousing. This can result in new business insights gained by leveraging data quickly in response to new business events and new information, regardless of where in the enterprise it may come from."

Why Solid State Drives Now?
Up until now, all data warehouses have been dependent on a large number of HDDs to match the skyrocketing performance of multi-core processors due to the stagnant growth in input/output (performance on the drives. With its speed, solid state technology can quench the processors’ massive thirst for I/O performance with far fewer drives. With Teradata’s massively parallel approach to storage, just one SSD can replace up to 17 HDDs, depending on workload. The result is that the data warehouse processor’s entire analytic power can be applied to a smaller amount of data, resulting in faster time to getting results. When the SSDs are mixed with larger capacity HDDs and Teradata Virtual Storage in one platform, the platform will deliver up to four times the performance per unit of data as compared to a solution with only HDDs.

According to Randy Lea, vice president, Product Marketing and Management, Teradata Corporation, "."  The design philosophy of Teradata Labs is to create solutions that
automatically manage data and workloads so database administrators are
free to focus on other tasks. For example, other vendors’ systems
require manual migration of data in and out of the SSDs, a process which
is slow, error-prone, requires more labor, and drives up the total cost
of operation.  With Teradata, the customer gets the maximum value from
SSDs without added delays or labor cost

Power to Enable Integrated Data Warehousing  
While the volume of data continues to grow, the number of business applications and users that leverage that data are also growing exponentially. Today, it is not uncommon for a business to have 20 or more business intelligence applications, up from as few at 2-3 applications as recently as two years ago. The ‘do more with the data’ approach of the integrated data warehouse ratchets up the need for more performance per terabyte of data space. The Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse platforms are the answer, because they enable all data to be integrated into one warehouse and simultaneously used by multiple applications to maximize the value of the data to the business.

Business Uses

• Enhancing Network Security – Current detection systems used by network providers and government watchdog agencies fall short in effective threat screening, because of the unprecedented number and sophistication of cyber attacks. These users need to simultaneously analyze the continuous stream of incoming packet data along with the massive long-term historical data to find patterns that lead to the discovery of threats. A data warehouse with a mix of solid state and HDDs and Teradata Virtual Storage technologies, results in improved situation awareness that enables a response to stop threats before they happen.
• Demanding High Performance: Business Intelligence Dashboards – The speed and complexity of today’s 24/7 business model demands that managers make up-to-the minute decisions regarding sales, inventory, operations or financial data. For example, a retailer can now instantly spot sales trends and react with inventory, supply chain, and pricing decisions to optimize their revenue and margin for products. The reliance on reports based on data from overnight batch processing gives way to operational business intelligence dashboards supported by active data warehouses. As dashboards enabled by SSD-based solutions replace day-old reporting, managers can be far more interactive and agile as they manage their business for enhanced profit.
• Accelerating to Real-Time Tactical Reporting and Interactive Analytics – Most businesses frequently analyze very recent and year over year transactions in their analytic applications.  This results in subsets of the data being heavily accessed – hot data.  The automatic movement of hot data to SSD storage substantially improves its response times and throughput, and substantially speeds the time to insight. As hot data cool, they are moved back to warm performance storage, and are replaced by newly hot data.
• Improving the Production Line – A manufacturer collects a variety of sensor data from its production processes, which will be used for immediate operational decision-making and strategic planning. The production manager can now make critical process decisions based on the current operational sensor data to optimize production yields and profits. The less time sensitive sensor data can be migrated to the appropriate storage and used much later for long-range strategic planning.

Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse 6680
The Active EDW 6680 has been designed for businesses that need the performance of SSDs, with a data warehouse performance improvement of up to four times over the same capacity of HDD-based systems. This platform is a way to deliver the highest performance per unit of data. To achieve this, Teradata Virtual Storage optimizes the physical placement of the data on the Active EDW 6680 to provide the ultimate in performance and flexibility.

The platform scales from seven TB to 36 petabytes of user data to support a range of data space needs. This platform provides performance and flexibility by leveraging mixed storage technology to match customers’ specific needs. The storage solution leverages the LSI Engenio storage arrays for performance with HDDs that range in capacity from 300GB to 600GB along with the enterprise-class SSD from Pliant Technologies at 300GB in capacity, both housed in LSI Corporation’s modular data storage enclosures.

"Teradata Virtual Storage requires a high-performance, robust storage system to deliver the data that today’s multi-core servers demand and provide the uptime that Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse customers’ require," said Phil Bullinger, executive vice president and general manager, Engenio Storage Group, LSI Corporation. "We’re very proud that Teradata has selected LSI storage technology for their new mixed-storage EDW platforms. This continues LSI’s long and successful OEM relationship with Teradata."

"Pliant Lightning enterprise-class SSDs enable the Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse 6680 to provide customers real-time dashboards and interactive analytics to help run their businesses more profitably," said Greg Goelz, vice president of marketing, Pliant Technology. "Pliant Lightning SSDs dramatically accelerates system and application performance while delivering predictable performance and reliability – all the key attributes of the Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse 6680."

Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse 6650
The Active EDW 6650 is for companies who plan to grow data storage capacity at the same rate as system performance. This HDD-based platform is SSD-ready for future performance growth and can transition customers to a mixed storage platform with SSDs and HDDs, as their business dictates the need for enhanced performance. A customer may decide to not upgrade to SSDs and continue to depend on a HDD-based Teradata Active EDW 6650 to manage the toughest, most demanding strategic and operational workloads. HDD is an economic storage option and will be the industry workhorse for years to come.

The Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse 6650 platform scales from 7.5TB to 92PB of user data, providing growth options and coexistence with five previous generations for investment protection. Based on the customers’ individual needs, the platform may include 300GB, and 450GB-sized HDDs.