SINGAPORE — Realizing the benefits of the cloud computing model to businesses today, data warehousing firm Teradata has decided to incorporate several cloud features into its data warehousing solutions, which could help firms, utilize their resources better.
Among the new features added to the vendor’s data warehousing solutions include the ability to self-provision resources and to provide elastic capacity on demand, two key attributes of most cloud implementations today.
Scott Gnau, president of Teradata Labs, said they are responding to movements in the industry that is increasingly giving preference for flexible computing options, which require minimal capital investments and overhead costs.
Gnau went on to claim that this is the “first credible cloud offering in the data warehousing space today.”
“Customers today like cloud computing because it takes a certain amount of risk for them to be able to allot expenditures on resources,” Gnau told representatives of the media at a roundtable here during the Teradata Universe Singapore 2012.
But unlike applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, data warehousing applications aren’t designed to be deployed in a public cloud, Gnau said.
This is because data warehousing applications are high on input-output (I/O) processes but low on CPU consumption especially when queries are being executed, which means users could get poorer performance than when they have on-site implementations.
“Even if cloud technology offers some economic advantage by way of lesser capital costs, it could be negated by the incremental cost in network bandwidth brought by the high amount of data movement,” the Teradata executive argued.
Teradata’s Active Data Warehouse Private Cloud, Gnau said, allows companies to enjoy the benefits of the cloud in their data warehouse implementations without having to worry about the inherent challenges that come with it, such as data exposure and data leaks.
In less than five minutes, the company claims, users can meet demand for analytics processing by creating a fully functioning data lab within the warehouse to provision and manage data for their particular needs.
The cloud deployment is implemented on the company’s Teradata 6690 platform, and comes packaged and optimized for the Teradata data warehousing application.
Gnau said any customer using their 6000-class systems can upgrade to an ADW Private Cloud environment if they ever wish to.
“Today’s global business environment can be volatile and consumer demands can shift rapidly,” Gnau stressed. “Teradata can provide instant and elastic resources so businesses can scale up or down as business conditions fluctuate.
Teradata is coming out of recent acquisitions as it forges its way to becoming one of the leading vendors in the space of analytics for “Big Data,” a phenomenon wherein the virtual data created by users will exceed the amount of space physical storage can accommodate in the next several years.
These buyouts include Aster Data to complement its Big Data analytics suite; Aprimo, an integrated marketing management suite, which allows firms to track interactions across various and new customer touch points; and ECircle, an email and mobile content delivery solutions firm.
“Big Data is not just large volumes of data,” Gnau clarified. “We’re talking about new and emerging types of data, and the new types of analytics that can be performed in those new types. That’s where Teradata wants to play.”
