Teradata Announces Data Stream Architecture

Teradata USA announced an advance in backup and recovery capabilities for its customers.

Data Stream Architecture is an alternative, and an eventual replacement to the legacy ARC-based BAR architecture that will triple backup performance and reap improvements in scalability, usability, and security.

In an era of HIPPA, Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulations on data retention and security, a BAR solution is essential to any enterprise data architecture, in fields like healthcare, finance, and telecommunications. DSA is part of a BAR solution that helps customers keep data safe and accessible to ensure BC and proper compliance with global regulations, all with minimal impact on data warehouse activities.

It was designed to optimize data streaming in and out of the database, achieving backup and restore windows. By removing bottlenecks in the software stack, data streaming rates for backups have been measured at up to five-times faster, with the appropriate hardware infrastructure improvements. Benefits include an incremental backup feature, which reduces the duration of backup activities by only sending new or changed data blocks to a backup target, instead of the entire object or database. Incremental backups are tailored for customers looking to reduce backup windows and storage requirements. It also improves the efficiency of dedupe devices such as EMC Data Domain, which will further reduce the amount of storage space required.

Meanwhile, temperature- and compression-aware features for hot and cold data allow data to be restored to the same temperature and compression states. Usability is improved via viewpoint BAR portlets that will be familiar to users. And, security is also enhanced because users have to authenticate through traditional channels, rather than a stand-alone user interface.

The advantages of having a BAR solution for long-term storage and BC are known in the industry, and the advocated BAR solution brings these benefits to the database’s massively parallel processing architecture. When BAR is integrated with the database, backup and restore jobs are coordinated across the entire system of servers and storage devices, and the result is performance and data availability with maximum-speed data throughput

“The vast majority of our customers already have their BAR solution supplied by Teradata, and nearly every Teradata customer uses some component of Teradata BAR,” said Scott Gnau, president, Teradata Labs. “Teradata DSA can help these customers create tremendous new value and sidestep BAR pitfalls like data capacity limits and backup windows that extend into production time.”

Data Availability
Data availability is crucial in situations where organizations make real-time decisions and suffer real-world costs when failure happens. Whether it’s soured customer relationships and churn from call centers that can’t access information, lost productivity recreating data repositories or hefty penalties for failing to meet data compliance requirements, organizations paralyzed by data unavailability lose time, money, and competitive advantage.

Technical Ease and Options
It is compatible with Teradata 14.10 (and newer) data warehouse and Symantec NetBackup 7.0 (and newer) backup software. There is a program available for customers to migrate their backup software licenses to NetBackup at little to no cost. Customers using the legacy ARC-based BAR can continue to leverage their BAR solution and use DSA to perform new backups, while restoring archived backup data using the legacy ARC-based BAR.

The ‘advocated’ solution simplifies backup responsibilities for the administrator, because it is designed, certified, procured, implemented, and supported by the company. Its scalable, parallel BAR architecture is optimized for performance and is based on hardware and software components from industry vendors.