Teradata Labs Unveils New Data Warehouse Concept

Teradata Corporation, a company solely focused on data warehousing and enterprise analytics, unveils a working prototype that demonstrates the innovative use of solid state disk (SSD) drives in a data warehouse environment.

"Teradata Labs is demonstrating the future of data warehousing," said Scott Gnau, chief development officer, Teradata. "Teradata Labs has developed a working prototype that leverages the solid state technology and validates our vision for a broad family of products to serve the diverse needs of our customers.

"Any data warehousing application is highly dependent on I/O or input-output performance. The SSD technology will offer more than two times improvement in performance and support blindingly fast analytics, while also decreasing power consumption. We anticipate that the incorporation of SSD technology will result in more than a 50 per cent power savings."

An SSD drive provides superior performance because it doesn't have delays in the reading or writing of data, which is inherent in conventional electro-mechanical disks. In consumer applications, it has a high level of mechanical reliability. The lack of moving parts almost completely eliminates the risk of mechanical failure. When fully developed for enterprise use, SSD drives will offer reliable and ultra-fast storage capability. It is anticipated that SSD drives will be available in 2011 for mainstream enterprise-class use. However, Teradata could be ready to deploy a data warehouse appliance configuration as early as 2009, depending on the market price and performance of SSD technology.

Teradata doesn't plan to abandon traditional hard drives. Because of its newly announced Teradata Virtual Storage architecture, customers will be able to leverage the price/performance of storage technology that best meets their business and budget needs. Customers will be able to choose from an SSD-only appliance configuration or mix SSD drives with traditional hard drives in a single, integrated Teradata enterprise data warehouse. Teradata Virtual Storage will automatically move data based on usage patterns to match the performance characteristics of the storage. "Hot" or frequently accessed data will be placed on the faster drives such as SSD drives, and "cold" or infrequently accessed data will be placed on slower drives. This hybrid approach, enabled by Teradata Virtual Storage, is the most cost-effective way to balance performance and storage costs.

"The beauty of Teradata's parallel architecture is that it was designed to leverage industry-standard technology," said Gnau. "Teradata's file system, automated data management, intelligent query optimizer and virtualised database kernel allow us to be market leaders in integrating new innovative technology."

Teradata Corporation, www.teradata.com.