New Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse Platform 6690

Teradata Corporation announced the availability of the Active Enterprise Data Warehouse Platform 6690 (Active EDW), which offers new generation of hybrid storage that enhances the data warehouse’s capability.

Teradata provides customers with the optimized use of SSDs and HDDs, which is enabled by Teradata Virtual Storage, its storage management software. The hybrid storage-based platform meets a broader range of customer analytic needs with expanded flexibility in the configuration and balance of SSD and HDD. EDW supports 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 different industries benefit from hybrid storage.

A manufacturer of high-value products is using a EDW hybrid storage-based platform to process data from a multitude of sensors located at multiple sites, on their production lines. They are able to 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 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 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 Active EDW 6690 is differentiated by:

• Hybrid Storage Technology: Teradata offers integrated, self-managing storage combining both SSD and HDD devices in the same platform. Its automated approach makes the storage management transparent to the database administrator and user. The firm delivers 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. It 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.
• Analytic Workhorse: The analytical workhorse of the leading companies, the EDW is the foundation for enterprise-class analytics. This system can manage the 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 manages concurrent mixed workloads that include ad hoc, tactical, and basic reporting queries.

For example, an e-retailer uses the new 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 flexibility of the new platform enables customers to choose an optimized configuration to meet their individual needs.

EDW supports systems starting at six TB and scales up to 60PB of user data to support a range of data space needs. Teradata continues to provide an optimized and integrated hardware and software stack based on new technologies. They include the Intel Xeon Multi-Core Processors, the NetApp E-series storage system with the new, space-efficient 2.5" HDD, while SanDisk provides the enterprise SSD with 400 capacity in a 2.5" unit.

Power to Enable Integrated Data Warehousing
EDW provides an environment that enables integrated analytics with fast parallel processing, scalability for massive volumes of data, and in-database analytic capabilities. Teradata provides a 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, the firm has collaborated with data mining partners to provide analytics and business intelligence with optimized in-database integrations.

Analytical Ecosystems
Companies are building complete analytical ecosystems from their Teradata platforms, augmenting their EDW with one or more special purpose appliances. By doing so, they are creating an efficient and powerful analytical ecosystem, which is optimized for price, performance, value, and system availability.

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 EDW platform achieves data center efficiencies because hybrid storage delivers more performance with fewer storage units. Customers benefit from the 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 system have become a critical factor to the information technology industry.

Investment Protection
Teradata’s architecture enables multiple generations of EDW nodes to coexist within the same system, allowing each generation to deliver performance. Teradata customers can continue to grow and expand their current system for many years, unlike all other data warehouse vendors that require a new system to take advantage of new hardware.

Versatility of Cloud-Based Data Warehousing
The EDW platform supports a private cloud environment through virtualized resources, scalability, elasticity, self-service business intelligence, and performance. As a result, it offers a powerful, flexible, and high-performance cloud-based data-warehousing environment to accommodate changing business needs. The data warehouse as a private cloud enables companies to consolidate their disparate data marts and ‘sand-boxes’ into an integrated data warehouse.