SCIENCE

Teradata Corporation has unveiled innovative new enhancements to its purpose-built platform family of powerful data warehouses. Engineered from their inception to deliver a range of analytic solutions for business intelligence problems faced by enterprises large and small, the updated platform family pushes the boundaries of performance, data capacity and ease of use to levels beyond anything in the data warehouse market.

Inside the data warehouses are advanced Teradata high-performance compute servers powered by dual Intel Xeon Processors, code named Westmere, the latest processor product from Intel with six computing cores.  Each server also leverages Teradata’s optimized parallel design, which takes full advantage of Intel Hyper-Threading Technology, and enables 24 virtual cores per compute server, matching core processing to physical drives to deliver industry-leading performance.

“Customers will benefit from the way Teradata’s optimized parallel design leverages the six-core Intel Xeon 5600 processors,” said Pauline Nist, general manager, Mission Critical Segment Team, Intel’s Data Center Group. “Teradata’s effective use of these new processors brings significant gains in performance, and performance-per-watt for mission critical solutions.”

At the heart of each machine is the industry’s most versatile, highest performance and feature-rich database, Teradata 13.10.  The industry’s first time-aware database, Teradata 13.10 delivers new temporal analytics that provide greater visibility into data while removing the expense, implementation overhead, and errors from managing and manipulating time-based history. Teradata 13.10 provides the most compression options in the industry with a significant storage savings of up to 20 times compression for select data types and up to 4 times overall compression to cost-effectively store and analyze greater volumes of data.  In addition, Teradata 13.10 offers Teradata Viewpoint, an innovative management web-based portal that gives users a complete view of their Teradata analytic ecosystem.

“With these new platforms, we continue our relentless obsession with technology innovation while continually improving the price-to-performance of our platforms,” said Randy Lea, vice president, product management and marketing.  “By using the latest and best-of-breed technology, such as advanced processors from Intel, and by adding our own advanced technology, we are able to stay ahead of our competitors and give users a complete family of options that are tailored for theirneeds, all at an attractive price point.”

The Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse 5650 – ramps up performance by 43 percent

The Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse 5650 can easily run more complex and increased workloads, continuous and batch loads, operational queries, simple reporting and complex analytics for thousands of users, all on the same platform. The Active Enterprise Data Warehouse boosts performance by 43 percent on a compute server to compute server basis compared to the previous generation. Yet the Active Enterprise Data Warehouse retains the same footprint as its predecessor thus reducing energy and space requirements on a performance-per-watt basis.
The advanced design of the platform means it excels equally well at workloads that are either central processing unit or I/O intensive, making it one of the most versatile data warehouse platforms in the industry. It also coexists with Teradata’s four prior generations of Linux-based Active Enterprise Data Warehouse platforms, so customers easily can introduce a new platform in their existing Teradata environment and get immediate performance improvements while protecting their initial investment.  In addition, the new platform leads the industry in enterprise data warehouse scalability with users able to expand the system from as little as seven terabytes (TB) of user data or to grow it to a staggering 86 petabytes (PB) of stored information.

Shipping now, the Active Enterprise Data Warehouse meets the real-time enterprise-wide data warehouse requirements of high performance, strict service level goals, mission critical availability, and investment protection for the lowest total cost of ownership in its class.

The Teradata Extreme Performance Appliance 4600 – simply the fastest most innovative data warehouse in the world

Shipping now, the Teradata Extreme Performance Appliance 4600 is the industry’s first and only data warehouse based solely on solid state drive (SSD) technology. This performance-driven platform radically changes the nature of how information is accessed in a data warehouse. Instead of using mechanical disk drives to store and retrieve data, SSDs use high performance flash memory, providing dramatically faster access times. For example, the average lag time to access a hard disk drive (HDD) is measured in milliseconds, while it’s mere microseconds for a SSD.  As a result, query rates can be up to18 times faster for data based in SSD than for HDD based data, meaning that workloads that once ran overnight can be finished during a cup of coffee.

Online retailers, financial institutions, manufacturers, network providers and others working in real-time, operational analytics environments where time-to-decision is a business-critical requirement will benefit from the new appliance.

To achieve these performance metrics, Teradata partnered with the leading SSD manufacturer Pliant Technology Inc. and storage component maker LSI Corporation to design the highest performing, and most reliable fully SSD data warehouse on the market.

“We are very excited about the new performance capabilities that Pliant’s Enterprise Flash Drives will bring to Teradata’s customers.  Integrating Pliant’s solid state technology was a seamless process and a natural fit,” said Greg Goelz, vice president of marketing, Pliant Technology.  “Pliant Lightning Enterprise Flash Drives deliver exceptional performance and reliability, and in combination with Teradata’s advanced technology, customers will be able to take advantage of this top-of-the line solid state technology to solve their real-time business challenges.”
The new appliance currently offers up to 17TB of uncompressed capacity. It uses 83 percent less power and requires 93 percent less data center floor space than a comparable performing data warehouse.

The Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance 2650 – where high performance and ease of use meet

The Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance 2650, the company’s fourth generation appliance, delivers an impressive 3.3 times performance hike over its predecessor on a cabinet to cabinet basis. Teradata’s innovative design makes it the first system in its class to include 2½-inch disk drives to improve parallelism and performance. And it offers the flexibility of deploying 300 gigabyte (GB), 600GB or 2TB capacity enterprise-class for up to 59TB of uncompressed user data per cabinet and it lets users configure systems from as little as 2TB of capacity up to 275TB of user data.  The Data Warehouse Appliance performance metrics are equally impressive, scanning data at more than 20GB per second per cabinet.

The Data Warehouse Appliance has improved workload management capabilities. These improvements include more granular support for new user types and expanded criteria for managing query workloads

Available today, the Data Warehouse Appliance includes an expanded software bundle that was unavailable in its predecessor, making the system even easier to use and manage. For example, it adds a new, free appliance backup utility (ABU) for a quick and easy way to move data to an external data store. And the addition of the Teradata Analyst Pack gives users easy to use tools for a wide range of tasks, including collecting usage and performance statistics to analyze specific workloads to improve their performance and tools to assists users to boost performance by helping them choose optimization options for a given workloads.

According to Lea, “In less then three years Teradata’s Data Warehouse Appliance business has grown faster than any vendor in the market.  We currently have over 150 installations in 20 countries around the world in over 13 different industries. This momentum provides customer confidence in Teradata’s focus and commitment to continuing to grow this segment of our business.”

The Teradata Extreme Data Appliance 1650 – delivers price-to-performance punch and world’s most scalable appliance

The Teradata Extreme Data Appliance 1650 is designed for extremely large data sets. Using 2TB drives, the system can scale to an astounding 187 petabytes of uncompressed data, up more than 3.5 times from the 50PB of capacity of its predecessor. Many businesses have data that is stored on backup systems, which is difficult to access. The Teradata Extreme Data Appliance offers customers analytical access to all archival information for historical analytics or for regulatory compliance.  With the advances in performance, capacity and scalability, the Teradata Extreme Data Appliance has a significant price-to-performance improvement over its predecessor. It will be available in December of this year.

Organizations that currently archive valuable information or are only able to analyze small subsets of its data can now load all of the data into the Extreme Data Appliance, create comprehensive queries and get complete analytical insight and knowledge. 

“The Teradata Extreme Data Appliance has a price-to-performance punch and impressive scalability that will wow experienced business intelligence professionals,” said Lea.  “It’s ready for even the most complex queries on the largest data sets will bring analytics with attitude to an enterprise.”

The Teradata Data Mart Appliance 560 – pushes entry-level performance and capacity to new heights

Teradata Data Mart Appliance 560 is an easy-to-use, entry-level system for departments inside an enterprise, small businesses and others who seek a fully integrated and pre-packaged solution for sophisticated intelligence applications. The single cabinet can be as small as 2TB and can scale to 11.7TB of uncompressed capacity of user data.

Now available, the Data Mart Appliance includes improved system management features such as remote management through Teradata Customer Services. Plus, users can add up to four Teradata Managed servers for a variety of applications such as Viewpoint, SMS, and Load Servers.

Best in its class for symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) data warehouses, the Data Mart Appliance comes pre-bundled with an array of software that makes it an ideal system for those companies that need to get their business intelligence solution up and running quickly.

The Teradata Platform Family – an analytic ecosystem of innovation and excellence defined

The breadth of capability in the new Teradata platform family reflects the changing needs of real-world analytics. The family of platforms lets users start small and have plenty of headroom to expand as required. They are part of the overall Teradata analytic ecosystem, which is a flexible foundation to easily manage and optimize analytics and business intelligence solutions.  The analytic ecosystem lets organizations run as many separate Teradata systems as needed to meet varying needs while keeping management costs low. Teradata uses a powerful set of products and tools designed to optimize the entire ecosystem. It provides critical capabilities such as high availability, multi-system management, data synchronization, data loading, master data management, backup, and easy to use web-based management capabilities. This broad ecosystem saves in training, application development time, system management, support and IT infrastructure.

“Our market research continues to show that companies are interested in a broad range of strategic, operational, and tactical decision support and automation requirements, and data warehousing deployment strategies, ranging from specialized data marts to enterprise data warehouses,” said Dan Vesset, research vice president of business analytics solutions, IDC. “In an environment of rapidly growing data volumes and numbers of business intelligence and analytics users, Teradata's portfolio of new products offers a broad choice of solutions to organizations that need high performance data warehouse systems, which are flexible and easy to manage.”