October 9, 2007

Marketing versus reality on the one-petabyte barrier

Usually, I don’t engage in the kind of high-speed quick-response blogging I have over the past couple of days from the Teradata Partners conference (and more generally have for the past week or so). And I’m not sure it’s working out so well.

For example, the claim that Teradata has surpassd the one-petabyte mark comes as quite a surprise to variety of Teradata folks, not to mention at least one reliable outside anonymous correspondent. That claim may indeed be true about raw disk space on systems sold. But the real current upper limit, according to CTO Todd Walter,* is 5-700 terabytes of user data. He thinks half a dozen or so customers are in that range. I’d guess quite strongly that three of those are Wal-Mart, eBay, and an unspecified US intelligence agency.

*Teradata seems to have quite a few CTOs. But I’ve seen things much sillier than that in the titles department, and accordingly shan’t scoff further — at least on that particular subject.

On the other hand, if anybody did want to buy a 10 petabyte system, Teradata could ship them one. And by the way, the Teradata people insist Sybase’s claims in the petabyte area are quite bogus. Teradata claims to have had bigger internal systems tested earlier than the one Sybase writes about.

Technorati Tags: Teradata, petabyte, data warehouse, Sybase, Wal-Mart, eBay