Teradata IntelliFlex All-SSD Platform

Teradata Corp. announced an all-memory update to its IntelliFlex platform that delivers performance and storage density in a single cabinet.

The upgrades are empowered by a move to all-SSD, which make it possible to reduce required data center space while delivering an increase in processing power for mission-critical analytics at the speed-of-thought. The company also announced the ready-to-run IntelliBase platform – in single cabinet support for multiple software technologies, re-deployable hardware, and low, commodity hardware price-point.

Both products are offered on-premises, with firm’s IntelliCloud availability coming soon, and run the same company’s database software to enable a performance hybrid cloud solution. Together, these platforms give customers new options that can help drive new business revenue opportunities, mitigate operational costs, and accelerate customer service.

With the growth in data, companies depend on trusted analytics to turn that data into valuable and timely insights to drive business decisions and compete effectively. They are employing increasingly advanced analytic techniques and putting that power into the hands of more users across their organization. As business demand for analytics increases, an elastic infrastructure is required to handle planned and unplanned spikes in demand.

“Our customers are experiencing unprecedented growth in their advanced analytics needs and now require massive gains in their data warehouse compute power,” said Oliver Ratzesberger, EVP and chief product officer, Teradata. “We specifically designed IntelliFlex to meet these demands inexhaustibly. By transitioning to all SSDs we now provide an all-memory appliance capable of delivering up to seven times the compute power per cabinet of our previous product – plus rapid performance elasticity that is simply unmatched in our market. We are providing our customers with more performance, more storage, and more memory in the same footprint, and at half the energy consumed per unit of performance delivered.“

IntelliFlex platform components

IntelliFlex platform
IntelliFlex, launched in early 2016, delivered a fabric-based architecture that enables the independent scaling of processing power and storage to match changing workload requirements. In its third release over the last twelve months, the company continues the rapid innovation of its IntelliFlex platform.

Despite providing orders of magnitude better performance than HDD drives, SSDs have been cost prohibitive to include as standard equipment in a data warehouse appliance. However, SSD capacities have continued to increase while prices have declined. The firm recognize and take advantage of this industry trend, making SSDs the preferred storage for enterprise-level analytics appliances.

Features of IntelliFlex cabinet (compared to the previous generation product) include:

Up to 7.5x increase in processing power for compute-intensive analytics using dual 18-core Xeon processors
Faster execution of data warehouse analytics with speed up to 4.5x greater
Lower data center costs by enabling up to 3.5x customer data space
Reduced carbon footprint with up to 2x performance per kW of energy used

Versatile IntelliBase platform
For entry-level data and analytic needs, the company created IntelliBase – a low cost solution capable of delivering a complete logical data warehouse in a solitary cabinet, with single vendor support. Enabling multiple technologies to run in the same IntelliBase cabinet makes this platform efficient and economical. As a true ‘all-in-one’ engineered solution, IntelliBase enables companies to architect their analytic ecosystems to match their needs today, but also provides the versatility to repurpose hardware to meet tomorrow’s changing business requirements. For example, a compute node used for Hadoop can later be converted to run Teradata Database, providing flexibility and investment protection for customers despite IntelliBase being engineered as a low-cost, commodity alternative.

“Customers are demanding flexibility. The emergence of Hadoop and big data analytics doesn’t replace traditional data warehousing, it complements them,” said Tony Baer, principal analyst, Ovum. “Teradata is taking advantage of advances in commodity infrastructure and combining it with its own value-add to deliver an engineered platform that gives analytics users the best of both worlds. On the same platform, Teradata is giving customers the choice of balancing disparate requirements between cost, service level requirements, and the ability to take advantage of the different types of analytics.“

IntelliBase features:

Multiple technologies packaged into a single, low-cost cabinet
Single-vendor support for Teradata Database, Aster Analytics, and Hadoop
Support for company’s ecosystem enabling applications: QueryGrid, Unity, Data Mover, Ecosystem Manager, Viewpoint, Listener, and more.
Investment protection with hardware that can be redeployed between technologies with software re-imaging