RainStor With Product for Teradata Customers

RainStor, Inc., provider of enterprise database for managing and analyzing all historical data, announces RainStor FastForward, a new product that enables customers to re-instate data from Teradata Corporation tape archives (also known as BAR) and move it to RainStor for fast, flexible query.

The company also releases the latest version of RainStor FastConnect, which enables bi-directional data movement between Teradata Database (version 14 and below) and RainStor. The latest version is available to customers. RainStor is designed for massive scale, runs on the lowest-cost hardware including native on Hadoop, provides a range of query options including standard SQL, Pig, Hive and MapReduce, and reduces storage footprints by up to 97% through its patented compression technology.

RainStor is a complementary database solution to Teradata, a specialist for enterprise data warehousing, built for complex analytics. The new FastForward product resolves an onerous challenge for Teradata customers that need to frequently archive data to offline tape, largely driven by data space factors. With support for only two versions of backward compatibility, the historical data remains on tape archives, making it difficult to access and query when business and regulatory users require.

Using FastConnect, users can offload older, historical data for ongoing data retention at a lower cost, essentially creating an active data archive. Customers have a choice when deploying RainStor: on-premise, in the cloud or natively on Hadoop Distributed File Systems (HDFS), which provides ease of scale and flexibility for query access. The FastConnect module is simple to use with most settings configured out-of-the-box. It is also engineered to be light on Teradata resources, requiring minimal CPU and I/O on the Teradata system.

“The RainStor solution helps our customers tame the data beast, including traditional historical data and massive volumes of big data,” said Chris Twogood, VP, product marketing, Teradata. “The RainStor solution is integrated and supports the Teradata Unified Data Architecture, providing the ability to retain an online archive where the data is available to users. Our customers now have the option to archive their data at very high compression rates and they don’t have to transfer it to tape drives or throw it away.”

FastForward reads ARCMAIN file format, the typical utility for Teradata customers, for Teradata versions V2R4, V2R5, V2R6, TD12 and TD13. This allows customers to access multiple years of historical data previously on tape. FastForward also allows time and resource savings since companies can re-instate data directly into RainStor without the need to run it through the Teradata system. Once in RainStor, companies can use FastConnect to push data into Teradata for deeper analytics, as business users demand.

“RainStor’s products for Teradata customers really help to economically manage exploding data volumes with an efficient way to offload the history for both analytics and compliance needs,” said Mark Cusack, chief architect, RainStor. “Additionally, by accessing years of data from tape archives using FastForward, the business now has peace of mind for ongoing data governance and regulatory requirements, while bringing more comprehensive data sets to business analysts. We believe this is a win-win.“