Viewpoints
Why Teradata
Check out this video to find out how this data
warehouse solution keeps up with the increasing
pace of data.
The Heat Is On
Teradata’s new temperature-based data warehouse solution makes smarter decisions faster.
by Jim Dietz
Enterprise leaders have an ever-expanding need to use the current business activity data provided by their integrated data warehouse to make accurate, real-time decisions. They also need long-term historical data to help identify trends and perform comprehensive analytics. Getting the best of both worlds efficiently and economically with one system requires the power of a hybrid storage solution.
The Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) 6680 delivers. It is the first platform with both solid-state drives (SSDs) and hard disk drives (HDDs) fully utilizing Teradata Virtual Storage, which automatically migrates data between the two types of disks to achieve optimum performance. This solution tracks data use and intelligently moves it to the appropriate disk—“hot” data on the faster SSDs and the least used “cold” data on the slower HDDs. The result is a platform that makes smarter decisions at hyper speeds.
Now that this revolutionary system has entered the marketplace, the heat is on for organizations to integrate and smartly manage the gamut of data temperature to dramatically speed up their decision-making capabilities and boost their competitive advantage.
Delivering Business Success
SSD is an innovative technology for data warehouses. An SSD device leverages the speed of semiconductor flash memory technology and robust management logic to provide fast, immediate, direct access to hundreds of gigabytes of data. Just a small group of SSD devices is needed to supply the storage performance required by data warehouse platforms.
Traditional electromechanical HDDs are an economical way to store and analyze vast amounts of data. However, their slower retrieval speeds mean a very large number are needed to meet the performance requirements for real-time analysis.
How can integrating these storage systems help businesses succeed? Consider this example:
Company A just loaded its current week’s sales figures into its mixed storage data warehouse. The data is fresh and hot, so it goes directly into the system’s SSD storage, where employees throughout the enterprise can run near real-time reports and make lightning-fast decisions about what should change (in marketing, operations or elsewhere) to improve next week’s sales performance.
Meanwhile, the system automatically migrates colder data that is weeks or months old from SSD into the larger-capacity, lower-cost HDD storage area. Employees can still access and analyze it quickly, just possibly not as quickly as the hot data. As data heats up again—such as sales figures for the same period last year—the system automatically moves that data into SSD storage so it’s ready when needed.
An Optimized Solution
The Teradata Active EDW optimizes the use of the hybrid platform with the unique Teradata Virtual Storage feature that moves hot and cold data to the appropriate location based on frequency of use. (See graphic, above.) Data is automatically transferred and maintained in the optimal storage drive, making the system precisely suited to support current analytics and event response while enabling long-term strategic analysis and reporting.
Teradata Virtual Storage helps ensure that data is placed on the most appropriate disk type. But data movement doesn’t stop there. The system migrates it as needed: As cooler data “heats” up in use, it is automatically moved to the SSD storage area. As it cools, it is transferred to the HDD storage area as “hot” data space is needed.
Any business that needs to make fast, short-term decisions in addition to conducting longer-range reporting and analysis can benefit from this mixed storage solution.
Teradata analysts conducted extensive research to determine the actual usage pattern of data within the warehouse. They determined that although data is constantly changing, at any given time, typically only about 25% of an organization’s data is hot, and the remainder is warm or cold. This information is used to determine the optimum ratio of SSD to HDD storage capacity, thereby enabling a balance of both performance and data capacity for the most economical Teradata Active EDW solution.
Short- and Long-Term Benefits
Whether organizations need to make immediate operational decisions or plan an effective long-term strategy, the Teradata Active EDW 6680 offers “temperature-based” information management that improves productivity as it speeds up reporting and ad hoc analysis for power and casual users alike.
This helps boost efficiency, profitability and business agility, even when the competitive heat is on. Any business that needs to make fast, short-term decisions in addition to conducting longer-range reporting and analysis can benefit from this hybrid storage solution.
Jim Dietz, platform marketing manager, has been with Teradata more than 16 years.