Teradata Active Data Warehouses Provide Private Cloud Benefits

Teradata’s Active Data Warehouses (ADW) have been providing customers with 90 to 100 percent utilization for years. The consolidation and centralization of numerous under-utilized, disparate data marts has resulted in data and analytics being more efficiently shared from one, centralized ADW among multiple organizations and thousands of users. In addition to the utilization benefits of an integrated, private cloud approach, the Teradata ADW Private Cloud provides customers with richer insights for better decisions and competitive advantage.

As a data warehouse private cloud, the Teradata ADW directly addresses a major pain point with CIOs by ensuring computing resources are optimized, and fully utilized – a significant economic advantage to any IT organization. By consolidating data warehouse servers onto a Teradata ADW Private Cloud, IT executives and their teams can be certain that their computing resources are fully utilized and producing ROI on a 7X24 basis.

In addition to reducing the number of servers and storage, a Teradata ADW Private Cloud also delivers both capital and operating expense savings, including labor, data center space, power and cooling. With the unique architecture of a Teradata ADW Private Cloud, companies can gain benefits without the performance penalty of more traditional virtualization approaches.

"Leading companies have consolidated underutilized servers and storage onto a Teradata ADW Private Cloud, reducing costs – while increasing utilization of their IT resources," said Scott Gnau, president, Teradata Labs. "By eliminating data marts, many with only 10-20 percent utilization, companies can consolidate onto a Teradata ADW Private Cloud running at 90 to 100 percent utilization."

Furthermore, by consolidating data marts onto a Teradata ADW Private Cloud, companies can integrate the data, which gives users a unified version of the most relevant data- more quickly and at less cost – for better business intelligence across disciplines and processes.

Business users can also benefit from better control of their computing resources with the self-service capabilities of a Teradata ADW Private Cloud. In less than five minutes, business users can easily meet the demand for analytics by creating a fully functioning data lab to provision and manage data required for their particular needs.

These resource utilization and self-service benefits are enabled by several key characteristics of a Teradata ADW Private Cloud:

Virtualized resources – Teradata virtualizes all processing and storage so users do not have to be concerned about the location or availability of system resources – only that they are getting timely answers to all their business questions automatically without performance penalty.

Business analytics – a Teradata Data Lab makes it easier for business users to explore unique data sets or prototype new analytic ideas.

Consistent performance – enables IT to meet business user service level agreements and to ensure user satisfaction by leveraging Teradata’s industry leading workload management as well as key technologies such as hybrid storage and columnar.

Elasticity – delivers the analytic resources dynamically and in real time as business user demand increases and decreases

Scalability – enables the environment to scale seamlessly across multiple dimensions including number of users, number of queries, and data volumes with support for data scalability up to 92 petabytes.

Building on the Teradata ADW Private Cloud architecture and based on customer requests, Teradata is now delivering Elastic Performance on Demand to accelerate and facilitate a private cloud, pay-per-use model.

"Today’s global business environment can be volatile and consumer demands can shift rapidly. Because of this unpredictability, it is sometimes difficult for CIOs to adequately plan for data warehouse capacity needs," Gnau added. "Teradata can provide instant and elastic resources behind the scenes so businesses can scale up or down as business conditions fluctuate."

With the release of Elastic Performance on Demand for a Teradata ADW Private Cloud, users can seamlessly address sudden surges in business activity, driven by such events as the launch of major marketing campaigns, or unexpectedly high demands in fad-driven manufacturing orders, or seasonal demand swings including holiday promotions.

"The combination of on-demand provisioning, an elastic model for adding and removing resources at any time, and pay-for-use pricing bring the key cost and agility benefits of cloud computing to the data warehouse," said Mark Madsen, president of Third Nature, an IT analyst firm. "The cloud is the future of IT infrastructure but public cloud offerings don’t meet the performance and availability requirements of BI workloads today. For the near future we need private cloud offerings like this."

"Through our Teradata ADW Private Cloud, we are the only data warehousing company providing CIOs a huge return on investment with fully utilized computing resources, while delivering to business users the flexibility of self-service data warehouse resource provisioning — and it’s available to customers today," Gnau said.