April 15, 2013
Notes on Teradata systems
Teradata is announcing its new high-end systems, the Teradata 6700 series. Notes on that include:
- Teradata tends to get 35-55% (roughly speaking) annual performance improvements, as measured by its internal blended measure Tperf. A big part of this is exploiting new-generation Intel processors.
- This year the figure is around 40%.
- The 6700 is based on Intel’s Sandy Bridge.
- Teradata previously told me that Ivy Bridge — the next one after Sandy Bridge — could offer a performance “discontinuity”. So, while this is just a guess, I expect that next year’s Teradata performance improvement will beat this year’s.
- Teradata has now largely switched over to InfiniBand.
Teradata is also talking about data integration and best-of-breed systems, with buzzwords such as:
- Teradata Unified Data Architecture.
- Fabric-based computing, even though this isn’t really about storage.
- Teradata SQL-H.
The upshot is that Teradata has at least 6 kinds of rack or cabinet it wants to sell you — along with software to connect them — of which it really thinks you should get at least 3:
- The 4 main Teradata-software appliances:
- Active Enterprise Data Warehouse (the new 6700). Teradata thinks every sufficiently large enterprise should have one of these.
- Extreme Performance Appliance (Teradata 4xxx), based on solid-state drives (which are also used in the 6xxx systems). At least I think so; the 4xxx wasn’t in the most recent slide deck I saw.
- Data Warehouse Appliance (Teradata 2700).
- Extreme Data Appliance (Teradata 1650).
- The Teradata Aster Big Analytics Appliance, running Aster and Hadoop software. Teradata basically thinks everybody should have one of these too.
- A separate cabinet for special-purpose “Teradata Managed Servers”. While there’s some space for Managed Servers in other Teradata appliances, Teradata now offers so many such capabilities that it thinks you will likely need a separate rack for those as well. These include (partial list):
- Viewpoint system management.
- Backup.
- Teradata Unity.
- Data movement, which is not the same thing as Teradata Unity.
- Data loading, which is yet something else.
- Generic compute (notably, to run SAS).
Even that doesn’t exhaust the possibilities:
- The 36 InfiniBand ports Teradata can fit into a cabinet aren’t enough, it suggests and presumably will sell you free-standing Mellanox switches as an alternative.
- That slide deck split the Big Analytics Appliance back out into Aster and Hadoop options.
- There also seems to be a SAS-specific modeling appliance.
And you can have — or in some cases must have — Teradata Managed Server nodes in other kinds of Teradata appliance.
Finally, Teradata also offers a stand-alone single- or several-node Teradata 670 Data Mart Appliance, notes on which include:
- The Teradata 670’s entry price is under $1/2 million, if you want to use it as your first Teradata system (something that evidently is happening, mainly outside the Americas).
- Another use for the Teradata 670 is for physical — as opposed to virtual — data mart spin-out.
- The primary use for the Teradata Data Mart Appliance, however, seems to be test/development for larger Teradata systems.
- The Teradata Data Mart Appliance is one of the options for placing in a separate managed-server Teradata rack.
Related links
- My recent musings on the variety of clusters and appliances an enterprise could have.
- A March, 2012 post on various vendors’ admissions that multiple analytic database systems are needed.
Categories: Data integration and middleware, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Pricing, SAS Institute, Teradata
Subscribe to our complete feed!
Comments
3 Responses to “Notes on Teradata systems”
Leave a Reply
On the Teradata-software appliance alternatives, yes, the Teradata Extreme Performance Appliance (the all-SSD platform) is missing from the platform family portrait. That’s on purpose since Teradata is de-emphasizing this product given there are alternatives that meet a wider range of market needs. Specifically, the Active EDW 6700 (that was just announced) with the hybrid storage capability provides extreme levels of performance for the “hot”, frequently used data automatically placed in SSD while also providing standard levels of performance on “warm and cold” data placed in HDD. We have found that while the market has needs for extreme performance focused on a small amount of data it also demands that at the same time they need to analyze larger amounts of, say, short history data. So, the Active EDW fits the market needs better. The Extreme Performance Appliance was the pioneer in the use of SSD for data warehouse needs, but our understanding of this very high performance space has matured.
On the SAS-specific modeling appliance mention, this is the SAS High-Performance Analytics Server (HPAS) for Teradata. It is a complete, “all in one” appliance with the Teradata database for the SAS HPAS software. The TD Model 700 Appliance offers the high performance data management capabilities of the Teradata database. SAS HPAS software also leverages Teradata’s architecture to distribute analytic processing across all of the servers in the system. This combines the strengths of SAS and Teradata by leveraging the SAS advanced analytics capabilities including model development and deployment with the Teradata platform.
Too lengthy already, so more in the next post on points around Managed Servers, Unity and Unified Data Architecture
Jim,
As you know, I’ve been predicting all along that you’d keep finding more use cases in which “purpose-built” should bow to mix-and-match. So that makes sense to me about the 4xxx. 🙂
[…] would also recommend Curt Monash’s site. His notes on Teradata here mirror my observation that a 30%-50% performance boost per release cycle is the target for most […]