RainStor, a provider of an enterprise database for managing and analyzing all historical data, has introduced RainStor FastForward, a new product that enables customers to re-instate data from Teradata tape archives (also known as BAR for Backup, Archive and Restore) and move it to RainStor for query.
The new RainStor FastForward product resolves a pressing challenge for Teradata customers that need to archive their Teradata warehouse data to offline tape, which can make it difficult to access and query that data when business and regulatory users require it, Deirdre Mahon, vice president of marketing, RainStor, explained in an interview.
“In certain industries, especially banking, it is very painful to bring tape back online in order to query it so what we are enabling with FastForward is the ability to bring that tape data back to life – put it on a RainStor repository where you can run all your queries and run them fast,” notes Mahon.
Customers may have hundreds of terabytes to petabyte-scale stuck on tape “and they literally have to hire people whose job is to go find the right tape, says Mahon. FastForward reads ARCMAIN file format, the typical utility for Teradata customers, for Teradata versions V2R4, V2R5, V2R6, TD12 and TD13. This allows customers to rapidly access multiple years of historical data previously on tape. In addition, points out Mahon, “We have the capability built into our product to know which schema was in use on which version.” FastForward allows significant time and resource savings since companies can re-instate data directly into RainStor without the need to run it through the Teradata system.
“You might bring 10 years of history and stick it in a RainStor repository. We can compress it down and make it much more economical. If you take a petabyte and put it in our RainStor repository, it becomes about 50 terabytes so it is economically desirable to not have it on tape and not have the pain and anguish of the manual intervention – whether you are querying data from 10 years ago or last year,” says Mahon.
By accessing years of data from tape archives using FastForward, the business can have peace of mind for ongoing data governance and regulatory requirements, while bringing more comprehensive data sets to business analysts.
In addition, notes Mahon, RainStor has also released the latest version of RainStor FastConnect, which enables bi-directional data movement between Teradata Database (version 14 and below) and RainStor. RainStor runs on low cost hardware including native on Hadoop, provides a broad range of query options including standard SQL, Pig, Hive and MapReduce, and reduces storage footprints by up to 97% through its compression technology. “With FastConnect, you can move older data off of the core production data warehouse and put it in the RainStor repository, and then if you ever need to get it back on the primary production warehouse, it goes bi-directional as well,” explains Mahon.
More information is available.