Yesterday marked the beginning of the annual Teradata Partners User Group conference with a flurry of announcements from the enterprise data warehousing leader focused on new product innovations and partner developments. "Information is power, but intelligence is transformative," James Vollmer, president of the Partners steering committee, announced to a buzzing room after stepping out of a custom Teradata-orange muscle car during the opening keynote.
While many vendor conferences have seen a substantial decline in attendance this year, the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, located on the Potomac across from the District of Columbia, was brimming with enthusiastic attendees seeing orange. In a down economy, Teradata has increased its revenues during the first half of 2009, noted Mike Koehler, president and CEO of Teradata. "Innovation is the key to long-term growth and survival for business," he told the audience.
Teradata labs have developed a new appliance that harnesses the flash memory technology of solid state drives to deliver 150 times the performance of conventional hard drives for data warehouse workloads. The Teradata Extreme Performance Appliance targets customers with significant scalability and flexibility requirements where complex event processing and in-memory processing technologies have been the traditional options. According to the development team, solid state drives provide superior performance because they don't have delays in the reading or writing of data, which is inherent in electro-mechanical disk.
"When customers need to know, now, they will be able to rely on the Teradata Extreme Performance Appliance to deliver subs-second responses to complex queries every time," Scott Gnau, Teradata Chief Development Officer. Capable of scaling from seven to 200 terabytes of user data, the platform will leverage multi-core Intel processor technology and the 64-bit SLES operating system. Availability is scheduled for the first quarter of 2010.
Teradata also announced what the vendor is calling the first public and private cloud computing offering for rapid analytics. "We are giving the power to the people from an analytics perspective," Gnau commented. "Teradata is all about choice that no other vendor can offer." The Teradata Agile Analytics Cloud is a set of products, capabilities and services designed to enable agile analytics in a Teradata private cloud environment eliminating the need to build physical data marts because production data can be accessed directly.
"IT organizations are under-resourced and under tremendous pressure to cut costs, driving some business users to create their own shadow IT organizations," Gnau explained. "These shadow IT groups create conflict between business users and IT groups. The Teradata Agile Analytics Cloud helps eliminate the conflicts and brings businesses and IT together, saving costs and enriching analytical insights." In tandem with this announcement, Teradata Express, the free, non-production version of Teradata Database, is now available on Amazon EC2 and VMware player.
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