Teradata’s Borderless Analytics Turns Hybrid Clouds into a Single Analytic Ecosystem

Teradata (NYSE: TDC), a leading analytics solutions company, is delivering on the promise of Hybrid Cloud with new technology advancements that provide extreme flexibility, resource agility and analytic freedom. Teradata is breaking down the borders of yesterday’s single system, single technology analytics and empowering companies to analyze data where they want, when they want, and across the data and platforms they need regardless of where they reside. The Teradata “Borderless Analytics” capability is made possible by the latest versions of Teradata QueryGrid™ software for analytics across heterogeneous, multi-system data stores, and Teradata Unity™ software for automated and seamless orchestration of a Teradata multi-system environment.

Enterprises are rapidly establishing a hybrid analytical ecosystem that combines on-premises appliances, on-premises virtualization technology, managed clouds and public clouds. These multi-system environments are necessary as companies balance spikes in usage, manage CapEx and OpEx spend, serve multiple user groups, and take strive to ensure analytic processing is close to the source data.

Teradata Borderless Analytics gives enterprises the ability to easily manage multi-system analytic environments and shift workloads to optimize resource utilization, while ensuring a seamless and transparent business user experience. It also enables cross-technology analytics, giving users access to heterogeneous analytic processing engines and data stores. For some companies, this will mean expanding from on-premises systems to cloud, while for others it will mean augmenting cloud with on-premises systems.

Teradata’s technology advancements will build a foundation that leverages cloud computing as an extension of on-premises systems to enable these innovative new use cases:

• Cloud “Bursting” – scales capacity to accommodate spikes in business demand
• Cloud “Data Lab” – drives business innovation and insight through self-service analytics, and promotes “data gravity” by locating analytics close to the data source
• Cloud Disaster Recovery – establishes a low-maintenance, off-premises disaster recovery solution while keeping data accessible without major IT efforts

“Agility is a critical business priority, but complexity created by today’s hybrid environments can slow everything to a crawl. Borderless Analytics is about infrastructure agility and unlocking new use cases,” said Oliver Ratzesberger, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Teradata. “We want to empower business users to continue driving valuable business insights using their existing tools to leverage the data they need, no matter where it lives. We want data scientists and ‘power users’ to have increased control of how and where they run their advanced analytics and predictive algorithms. And, we want DBAs and system administrators to manage their multiple systems as one.”

Using Teradata Borderless Analytics, enterprises can:

• Seamlessly leverage multiple data stores and analytic engines to provide integrated business insight
• Simplify management of multi-system environments
• Minimize data movement by processing data where it resides 
• Match compute resources and data storage based on business value, including query traffic (“throttling”), workload management and data compression
• Maintain security and data encryption

“Modern analytical ecosystems require a combination of technologies, data sources, data types, databases and analytic engines. At the same time, companies are moving towards hybrid environments including on-premises appliances, on-premises virtualization technology, managed cloud, and public cloud. All of that amounts to complexity, boundaries, and data silos,” said Tom Davenport, President's Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College. “This is a timely release for Teradata, because many businesses today are struggling mightily to extract new insights from data stored on multiple platforms.”

Teradata QueryGrid
Today, Teradata QueryGrid software delivers analytics across heterogeneous, multi-system data stores. The next-generation QueryGrid will feature a powerful new underlying architecture that will enable new groundbreaking enhancements including:

• One connector for each target system to ensure consistent syntax and behavior regardless of which system initiates the query
• New system services, such as enhanced security, encryption and performance monitoring

Next-generation enhancements to Teradata QueryGrid are targeted for availability starting in Q4, 2016.

Teradata Unity
Today, Teradata Unity software delivers high availability and workload distribution, ensuring users always have access to relevant data and analytics within their service-level requirements. Teradata is introducing new feature enhancements to Unity that will bring powerful cross-system capabilities to further remove analytic boundaries and:

• Manage Teradata systems across the complete suite of hybrid database platforms: on-premises appliances, on-premises virtualization environments, managed cloud, and public cloud (available now)
• Intelligently capture select data changes from one Teradata system and automatically copy them to other Teradata systems (target availability 1H, 2017)
• Push-button system initialization which can copy an entire database from one system to another, creating a replica which can be used for Dual Active availability, disaster recovery, quality assurance, test, or development (target availability 1H, 2017)

"We welcome the introduction of Teradata Borderless Analytics, as we believe the prospect of running analytics across multiple data stores and analytic engines for more holistic visibility are a competitive requirement as well as an important business advantage,” said Sendil Thangavelu, Data & Analytics Leader at Flex. “Our Teradata environment powers data management and we are always looking for ways to advance our capabilities. As one of the most analytics-intensive organizations in the world, the borderless approach is in synch with our business direction."

Borderless Analytics will work in tandem with Teradata Everywhere™, which delivers the world’s most powerful, massively parallel processing (MPP) platform across multiple public cloud, managed cloud, on-premises VMware, and on-premises appliances, to drive new business models for enterprises.

Relevant News Links

•  A new blog on this announcement by Oliver Ratzesberger is posted here.
•  The new Teradata Everywhere press release can be accessed here.