Teradata to Host Database on AWS Cloud

Amazing Growth in Data Requires Innovative New Solutions

Recognizing that the laws of data gravity are in fact immutable, Teradata today announced that Amazon Web Services (AWS) will become the first public cloud on which it will host its database.

Chris Twogood, vice president of product and services marketing at Teradata, says that with massive amounts of data heading into the cloud, it behooves providers of analytics applications to bring that capability to where the data resides instead of asking IT organizations to move it back on premise to be analyzed.

Twogood says it only make sense that Teradata would add support for AWS, the largest public cloud, first. But he added that Teradata plans to add support for other public clouds in fairly quick succession.

In the meantime, Twogood described the data warehouse efforts of AWS, which largely manifest themselves in the form of RedShift, as being complementary to the Teradata database in that the former is mainly focused on what he describes as “disposable data” versus production analytics applications that typically run on the Teradata database. As such, Twogood says Teradata envisions that there will be data moving between Redshift and Teradata, and that users of business intelligence and visualization tools on AWS will invoke the Teradata database as well.

Essentially, Teradata is signaling that it’s not particularly interested in where a Teradata data warehouse resides. Given the fact that Teradata generates half its revenue from professional services, Twogood says Teradata is open to working with customers on just about any platform they choose.

Ultimately, Twogood says that in support of those analytics applications, IT organizations will replicate data between instances of Teradata databases running on premise and in the cloud. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that IT organizations will need to move large amounts of data between databases just to support a particular application.