October 23, 2008

How to tell Teradata’s product lines apart

Once Netezza hit the market, Teradata had a classic “disruptive” price problem – it offered a high end product, at a high price, sporting lots of features that not all customers needed or were willing to pay for. Teradata has at times slashed prices in competitive situations, but there are obvious risks to that, especially when a customer already has a number of other Teradata systems for which it paid closer to full price.

This year, Teradata has introduced a range of products that flesh out its competitive lineup. There now are three mainstream Teradata offerings, plus two with more specialized applicability. Teradata no longer has to sell Cadillacs to customers on Corolla budgets.

But how do we tell the five Teradata product lines apart? The names are confusing, both in their hardware-vendor product numbers and their data-warehousing-dogma product names, especially since in real life Teradata products’ capabilities overlap. Indeed, Teradata executives freely admit that the Teradata Data Mart Appliance 551 can run smaller data warehouses, while the Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance 2550 is positioned in large part at what Teradata quite reasonably calls data marts.

When one looks past the difficulties of naming, Teradata’s product lineup begins to make more sense. Let’s start by considering the three main Teradata products.

Less central but still not trivial are Teradata’s non-MPP products. These are meant primarily for test and development, with deployment on Teradata 5550s or other four-digit-number Teradata products, and include:

Notwithstanding their main purpose, these systems are sometimes used in production. One way or the other, if I understood correctly, over 100 550-series systems have been sold in the past year.

Teradata has a nice four-page brochure with much of this information, including some clear and colorful tables, but I haven’t been able to find a URL for same. Perhaps some helpful Teradata person will kindly post a link. What I did find on Teradata’s arcanely organized website isn’t nearly as good. Edit: See the first comment below for a link!

Comments

14 Responses to “How to tell Teradata’s product lines apart”

  1. Erin Fagan on October 23rd, 2008 3:29 pm

    Here is the link to the brochure list as the first item in additional resources on the link you provide. Hope it helps.

    http://www.teradata.com/library/pdf/EB5778.pdf

    Erin Fagan
    Director Marketing Communications
    Teradata

  2. Curt Monash on October 23rd, 2008 5:11 pm

    Thanks, Erin. That’s exactly the one I had in mind!

    Best,

    CAM

  3. anonymous on October 25th, 2008 12:34 am

    The DBMS nodes in the 2550 and 5550 are not Dell 2950s. There is an optional Managed Server application node which is a Dell 2950. The 551 uses a Dell server.

  4. Curt Monash on October 25th, 2008 3:47 pm

    Well, they can’t be exactly Dell 2950s, because those have a certain amount of disk built in.

  5. Curious on November 3rd, 2008 9:30 am

    As a non-Teradata customer, how do I go about buying the software only version of Teradata, or is this just marketing?

  6. Infology.Ru » Blog Archive » Что думает о твердотельных накопителях Карсон Шмидт из компании Teradata on November 11th, 2008 2:20 am

    […] категоричная форма данного утверждения была бы неверной.) Поэтому Карсон не предвидит больших изменений тогда, […]

  7. Positioning Choices in the Analytic DBMS Market | The Monash Report on November 12th, 2008 1:25 am

    […] a huge amount of research backing up this analysis over on DBMS2. (Just one example – my recent Teradata product line overview.) But I also invoked some underlying marketing theory. Part of that has been posted on Strategic […]

  8. Jacky on November 14th, 2008 3:53 am

    do teradata still have different pricing schemas for their nodes when adding a bynet fabric card to extend the configuration from 4 to 16 and to 64 nodes etc? in the past it was after the 4th node you need that bynet card to extend to 16 nodes so starting from the 5th node the prices become quite high…same thing after the 16th node… giving the new capacity of the 5550 to old more nodes, when do we need a fabric card? 9th node?

  9. Jacky on November 14th, 2008 3:54 am

    correction: the 5550 to hold more nodes

  10. The Teradata Accelerate program | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services on November 22nd, 2008 7:07 pm

    […] expensive!”, starting with the new appliance offerings in April and accelerating with further new offerings announced in October. And the Teradata Extreme Data Appliance 1550’s pricing raised a few […]

  11. Confluence: Product on March 10th, 2009 9:17 pm

    Pricing…

    File System EMC From Mike’s discussion with an industry analyst, EMC is charging $1800/TB/yr for Atmos cloud storage: EMC is rolling out Atmos, its nextgen storage architecture…….

  12. Teradata’s Active Enterprise Data Warehouse story | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services on August 24th, 2009 4:34 am

    […] Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) story. That’s no longer the case. Last year, Teradata introduced a range of products. I think Teradata is serious about selling its full product range, and by now has achieved buy-in […]

  13. Teradata’s Active Enterprise Data Warehouse Story | Warehouse Management News on September 9th, 2009 9:30 am

    […] Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) story. That’s no longer the case. Last year, Teradata introduced a range of products. I think Teradata is serious about selling its full product range, and by now has achieved buy-in […]

  14. Is the enterprise data warehouse a myth? | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services on April 12th, 2010 7:52 am

    […] Teradata doesn’t push an EDW-only strategy any more Categories: Data models and architecture, Data warehousing, Database diversity, […]

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