Teradata Unveils 'Extreme' Data Warehouse Appliance

Teradata says it will offer early next year a data-warehouse appliance that uses solid-state drives for workloads to achieve speeds 150 times faster than conventional hard drives.

A beta version of the Extreme Performance Appliance 4555 was introduced Monday at the Teradata Partners User Group conference in Washington, D.C. The device is scheduled to be available for purchase in the first quarter of 2010.

Teradata claims the appliance can deliver "sub-second" responses to complex queries, while offering scalability and flexibility over other technologies, such as complex event processing and in-memory processing.

In announcing its new appliance, Teradata is responding to the business intelligence industry's emphasis on analytic speed. CEP and in-memory processing are two of the technologies offered by vendors today to reduce analytic latency.

CEP platforms analyze streams of data as they flow from live sources, such as transaction flows, click streams and market data feeds. Leading vendors, according to Forrester Research, including Progress Software, Aleri, IBM, StreamBase Systems and Tibco Software.

In-memory online analytical processing is a big trend in BI today. The technique boosts analytic speed by storing data in cache for faster querying.

Teradata's answer to the industry's need-for-speed is to reduce delays in reading or writing of data from hard disks through the use of flash memory SSDs. "The Teradata Extreme Performance Appliance has been engineered to scan and aggregate millions of rows of data in sub-second time, perform deep analytics on select sets of data, and then provide a fast response to operational queries," according to the vendor.

The new appliance is targeted at several industries that would find a higher-performing data warehouse useful. Those industries include electronic commerce, manufacturing and logistics, travel and transportation and telecommunications.

Besides speed, Teradata says its use of SSDs provides better energy efficiency and takes up less space than data warehouses that depend on traditional hard drives. A single cabinet of the Extreme Performance Appliance prototype consumers about 14% of the energy and requires 7% of the floor space of an equivalent performance data warehouse, according to the vendor.

The new appliance scales from seven to 200 terabytes of user data. The product uses multi-core Intel Xeon processors and the 64-bit Linux SLES 10 operating system.

Teradata makes several other appliances, including the Active Enterprise Data Warehouse, the Data Warehouse Appliance and the Data Mart Appliance. The vendor is among several companies pursuing the emerging trend in BI toward more inclusive, ready-to-run data warehousing offerings. Other appliance vendors includes Kalido and SAS.