Teradata Supercharges Analytics With Active Enterprise Data Warehouse 6750

US business analytics expert Teradata has updated its Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) hardware platform to offer eight times more memory per rack, three times more flash and 40 percent more processing power.

The Active EDW 6750, unveiled at the Teradata Universe conference in Prague, takes advantage of the new 12-core Ivy Bridge chips and can scale to hold up to 61 Petabytes of information. For comparison, the entire written works of mankind in all languages since the beginning of recorded history are equal to approximately 50 Petabytes.

Super storage

Active EDW 6750 is a fully automatic appliance designed to run the latest version of Teradata database and Teradata Aster software. It can deliver both real-time business intelligence and analytics, as well as traditional data warehouse functionality with extended discovery features.

The appliance combines RAM, flash memory and spinning disk, with the most frequently accessed data stored in-memory and the least frequently accessed data residing on traditional hard drives. It can be considered much “greener” that the EDW released three years ago, with up to four times the improvement in energy and space utilization,

Active EDW 6750 is built using commodity hardware and customers can even attempt to assemble one themselves, although Teradata CTO Steve Brobst warns against it. He told TechWeekEurope that Dell came closer than most towards creating its own EDW, but the project was scrapped after a year because it was just “too much work”.

On the software side, Active EDW 6750 runs the latest version of SUSE Linux with a heavily modified kernel. Teradata has been relying on SUSE for the last seven years, and its engineers told us that part of the reason is the distribution’s solid security credentials.

Unlike some of its competitors, Teradata doesn’t ask customers to replace their infrastructure in order to upgrade. Several generations of the company’s hardware can co-exist, and the new EDW can be simply added alongside the previous version of appliance.

“Some of my queries, which would take four to five hours, are now coming back in a few minutes,” said one of the early adopters of EDW 6750, a global package delivery company. “Being able to demonstrate to our customers that we understand, care, and want to build on our business relationship at the earliest opportunity adds value.”

Teradata is currently working on improving the compression algorithms to make more efficient use of storage. The amount of potentially useful information is growing faster than the size of the IT budgets, and he company wants to prevent its customers from blowing all their money on hard dives. “Big Data has captured a large mind share, but its share of the wallet is not that large,” said Teradata CEO Mike Koehler.

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