Examining the Teradata Data Warehouse
With both relational and columnar options, the Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse gives companies an efficient, scalable appliance they can deploy in-house or in the cloud.
The Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse platform provides data warehouse functionality in a single appliance that supports the parallel, shared-nothing architecture of the Teradata Database.
The Teradata data warehouse appliance is built and configured for plug-and-play, scalable, Massively Parallel Processing data warehousing. It combines relational and columnar capabilities, along with limited NoSQL capabilities in the form of name/value pairs and JSON support.
This appliance is designed for large organizations in retail, finance, communications, manufacturing and healthcare vertical industries that need scalability and high performance from their data warehouses.
Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse features
The current version of the Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW), the 6800 series, increases the overall computational power of the platform by 25% compared to the previous version. This is achieved using the Intel Xeon Processor E5-2600 v3 family.
One of the Teradata data warehouse's most compelling features is its hybrid storage, where frequently used hot data is stored on very high-performance solid state drives while less frequently used cold data is placed on traditional hard disk drives. The placement and migration of data based on data temperature is fully automatic and ongoing with the Teradata Virtual Storage feature. By paying attention to data temperature, Teradata can deliver higher query throughput and more consistent response times.
Teradata also uses the Teradata Active EDW 6800 to support its Unified Data Architecture, which enables organizations to access and analyze relational and nonrelational data.
The Teradata data warehouse platform runs on Linux, which is delivered preinstalled as part of the database appliance.
When it comes to version support, Teradata offers multigeneration coexistence. This means that any version of the appliance can work with any other version over the Infiniband backbone. With this capability, users don't have to wholesale replace appliances as rapidly as they might with competing data warehouse platforms.
Licensing, pricing and support for Teradata Active EDW
This product can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud. On-premises support is delivered via a fully configured plug-and-play database appliance. Cloud support is available directly from Teradata or through Amazon Web Services.
Pricing for the Teradata Active EDW appliance is based on each customer's performance requirements and is calculated using the Teradata performance metric known as TPerf. Customers requiring higher performance pay a higher price based on a properly configured appliance. Teradata can scale the Active EDW up to 2,048 nodes, with up to 35 MB of cache per processor and overall storage ranging from 10 terabytes to 94 petabytes, as needed. Conversely, customers that don't require the high end of those CPU, cache and storage ranges pay a lower price.
Although the Active EDW is delivered as an appliance, Teradata Express, a free download version of the Teradata database, is offered as a software-only option for anyone who wants to learn how Teradata operates. This version doesn't provide the linear scalability of the appliance option and isn't designed for operational implementation of large-scale data warehouses.
Teradata offers several support options, including:
- Delivery of support on-site, remotely, offshore or a combination.
- Coverage for the day shift, off-hours or 24/7.
- Customizable levels of service and types of tasks based on customer needs.
- Contract terms that range from one to three years.
Active EDW embeds Teradata ServiceConnect, which collects data and monitors events automatically, identifying issues, defects and faults. ServiceConnect sends and tracks alert notifications and integrates with Teradata Vital Infrastructure, which delivers proactive support on each Teradata platform. With these embedded components, Teradata can reduce the average time-to-resolution of problems.
