Five Questions to Ask Before Choosing a Cloud Platform Solution
Given the volumes of data that now need to be processed, analyzed and stored, many IT organizations are realizing that from both a technology and financial perspective, the size of the task being presented is simply too big to manage alone.
At the Teradata 2013 Partners User Group conference, Teradata announced that it is moving to help customers ease that burden with the launch of Teradata Cloud, a managed service that provides advanced data management technologies without organizations having to invest in acquiring IT infrastructure to support them.
According to Chris Twogood, vice president of product and services marketing for Teradata, the goal is to provide a service through which organizations can leverage the data management expertise of Teradata personnel to manage the deployment of Teradata Database and Teradata Aster Discovery Platforms alongside of Hadoop. At the conference, Teradata also announced that Netflix has signed up to become one of the first Teradata Cloud customers and that it is also offering Teradata Master Data Manager via the cloud or on-premise.
In addition, Teradata is providing its Integrated Marketing Management application via the cloud or on-premise along with a Customer Interaction Manager application.
Under the auspices of the Teradata Unified Data Architecture, Twogood says customers can now leverage a cloud service that maximizes their investments in data scientists. Instead of requiring those organizations to set up all the plumbing required to drive Big Data analytics applications, Teradata Cloud provides the infrastructure needed to minimize the time to value associated with developing those complex types of applications.
In addition to unfurling Teradata Cloud today, Teradata also announced a Teradata Extreme Data Platform 1700 appliance that takes advantage of compressed data to lower the cost of deploying a SQL database to $2,000 per terabyte, a new in-memory Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance 2750 that is three times faster than the company’s previous offering, and support for Java Script Object Notation (JSON) in Teradata data warehouses.
Twogood maintains that it doesn’t make financial sense to push all data into memory. Hot data that is critical to application performance needs to run in memory, but warm and cold data is more cost-effectively handled by magnetic storage. The Teradata Unified Data Architecture, says Twogood, is specifically designed to automatically optimize the placement of data on different elements of the Teradata portfolio.
The degree to which organizations will invoke data management services in the cloud will vary. Over time, most organizations should expect data management to become more federated across the cloud and on-premise systems. In fact, the location of those data management systems may not be nearly as important as the ability to make sure the management of those systems remains unified.
