Dan Graham and Mike Riordan presented on Teradata’s cloud strategy. They began with a quick reminder that a cloud involves on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and pay per use. Teradata is currently testing and developing for clouds and virtualization – Teradata Express.
They are working with amazon.com’s web services team for instance around public clouds. Today they are good enough for some workloads. There are challenges, for instance, in that public clouds tend to use cheaper commodity hardware to keep costs low. Availability and security are good but performance is limited by this. Teradata is also working on private clouds. Obviously this gives companies more control over the power of the hardware involved.
Current Teradata cloud products are :
- Elastic Mart Builder which uses private clouds and TD hardware
- Teradata Express for VMWare (private cloud)
- Teradata Express for Amazon EC2
Teradata Express is limited to a 1TB approach and is a no upfront cost license. Both public and private cloud versions are only licensed for development, test and evaluation – not production. You could use it to see new features and try them, do training, develop prototypes or do QA etc but not to do performance testing or anything real.
Teradata is also using a cloud approach to their Agile Analytics Cloud using their Elastic Mart Builder. This involves business users being able to self provision (assuming the server has capacity). Once they do, and move their spreadsheets into the data warehouse environment, they can join their local data to the enterprise warehouse and run the whole thing in a massively parallel way.
Teradata is not ready to move to production cloud yet, but they see both business and IT users taking advantage of private/public cloud-based Teradata installs to develop proofs of concept, do development and fail fast as necessary.
Comments on this entry are closed.