Teradata Releases New Lightning-Fast Data Warehouse Appliance

“As the recognized market leader, Teradata has now introduced its second generation data warehouse appliance for entry-level or departmental business intelligence and complex analytics. The Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance is unmatched in price-performance for real world business intelligence applications,” said Darryl McDonald, chief marketing officer, Teradata. “The new Teradata Corporation continues to aggressively develop innovative products and services that help our customers be leaders in their industries. It’s easy for new entrants and appliance vendors to claim better price-performance than traditional solutions, but Teradata has been proving it every day for years.”

The Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance 2550 provides a simple, easy-to-use, powerful platform for entry-level data warehousing and data marts at an attractive price. It is purpose-built and optimized for fast scans. Commented McDonald, it offers customers tremendous performance improvement, a 50-percent reduction of the data center footprint, higher system availability, mainframe connectivity, integrated application server and enhanced system and workload management over the previous Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance 2500. It scales up to 140 terabytes with a U.S. list price of $119,000 per terabyte.

“The query scan rates of the Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance are up to 150 percent faster than other vendors’ appliances. Lightning speed scan rates enable Teradata customers to get answers to their business questions at unprecedented speed,” said Scott Gnau, chief development officer, Teradata. When the patented “intelligent scanning” innovation of the Teradata 12 database is exploited by the Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance, query performance dramatically increases up to 10 times for selected queries. The Teradata 12 software foundation provides full feature and advanced functionality for traditional analytic needs while also providing uniquely sophisticated extensions for new emerging requirements like geospatial, in-database mining, and data encryption. “This means typical appliance buyers will not need to compromise by choosing lower featured products,” said Gnau.

Teradata intelligent scanning eliminates the need to analyze massive amounts of data and provides extreme performance without specialized hardware. Teradata’s intelligent scanning allows for easy set-up, automatically rewrites problem queries and routes queries on the best path to optimized execution.

Teradata’s approach has always been to eliminate the need to scan data whenever possible. Teradata’s intelligent scanning can eliminate as much as 95 percent of the scanning required by its competitors, which dramatically increases query performance. For example, a business user wants to know “sales this week vs. sales this week last year only in the state of Delaware.” Many vendors would need to scan two years or 104 weeks of history for all 50 states to answer the question. By partitioning tables on date by week and state, the Teradata 12 database now scans only two weeks of data in one state, eliminating the need to scan all 104 weeks of data in all 50 states. Teradata’s intelligent scanning does all the work automatically so that application developers and tool providers can focus on other tasks.

The Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance joins the existing Teradata platform family, the Teradata Data Mart Appliance 550 and the Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse 5550. All members of the Teradata platform family leverage the recognized industry leading Teradata 12 database. The Teradata platform family offers customers exciting new options for them to take full advantage of all the power of Teradata anywhere in their enterprise – as an active data warehouse, enterprise data warehouse, entry-level data warehouse, special-purpose data mart or sandbox environment.

“With the introduction of a family of data warehouse appliances, Teradata has opened the window in a stuffy room to let fresh air blow in. At least, that is the way that many Teradata customers are reacting to this announcement,” said Dr. Richard Hackathorn, president of Bolder Technology, Inc. “The Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance caps the high-end of their appliance family, which for savvy IT executives will provide a full range of architectural alternatives for their enterprise data warehousing needs from Teradata.”

The Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance is an affordable, fully integrated, scalable platform with quad-core Intel processors, industry standard enterprise-class storage, open Novell SUSE Linux 64-bit operating system, and the Teradata 12 database and utilities. All are pre-installed in a single “ready-to-run” cabinet with energy-efficient green design.

“Unlike the start-up appliance vendors, Teradata has delivered systems that are ‘purpose built’ for enterprise data warehousing for years,” said Gnau. “Within hours of delivery to a data center, the Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance can be up and running and ready to load business data. Teradata’s platform, storage and flexible database are an optimal mix of data warehouse components, which is then configured and tested before delivery. This pre-packaging of the data warehouse components ensures the fastest deployment.” Regardless of the size of their data warehouse, Teradata customers can count on the most experienced data warehouse architecture and industry consultants as well as customer service experts to help architect, deliver and support the optimal business intelligence solutions to meet their needs.

Teradata invented the original appliance and is one of a few companies to qualify as a provider of data warehouse (DW) appliances based on the generally accepted industry definition of an appliance below:

    * Fully integrated components,
    * Includes database, central processing unit (CPU), and storage,
    * Single vendor solution,
    * Built for the purpose of data warehousing,
    * Easy to deploy, and
    * Simple to manage and use.

The combination of these attributes creates low total cost of ownership and quicker deployments. Many claim to be appliance vendors, but few qualify since they do not have all of the attributes that customers are seeking in appliance solutions.

“No data warehouse appliance pure play can offer a commercial platform as scalable – in-database capacity, workload management, concurrent usage, and fast data loading – or as flexible in deployment, optimization, and administration features as DW market leader Teradata, which has long had an appliance-like value proposition,” wrote James Kobielus, senior analyst, Forrester Research, in “Appliance Power: Crunching Data Warehouse Loads Faster and Cheaper Than Ever” (April 2008).

On September 23, at Noon EDT, Gnau will host an online chat, “Intelligence Without Limits,” to discuss Teradata’s new data warehouse appliance. In addition, he will focus on Teradata's role as the leading innovator of data warehousing technology, including advanced features and functionality in the Teradata database that address emerging trends such as geospatial integration.