RainStor and Teradata Target Big Data

Teradata Corporation and RainStor are combining forces to grab a larger slice of the growing 'big-data' pie. RainStor's data compression and reduction software will be incorporated into Teradata's 'Purpose Built' Platform family and BAR solutions to offer customers an up to 50x-plus compression rate and 'the lowest price per terabyte', and storage footprint reduction of up to 97 percent. Additionally, data is online and accessible and can be queried using standard SQL and a number of business intelligence tools. Products are scheduled to ship in the first half 2011.

According to IDC, at nearly 500 exabytes - or 500 billion gigabytes - the 'Digital Universe' is big and will double every 18 months (As the Economy Contracts, the Digital Universe Expands, May 2009). Storage budgets have increased from 10 percent of the IT hardware budget in 2007 to 17 percent in 2009, states Forrester Research (Controlling Storage Costs Amid High Growth, published in February 2010). And Enterprise Storage Group's 2010 IT Spending Intentions Survey shows the top five priorities are: increase use of virtualization, information security initiatives, improve data backup and recovery, upgrade network infrastructure, and manage data growth.

This is a serious and growing problem -- and opportunity -- company officials. There are a number of reasons behind this data explosion, including the spread of compliance regulations across numerous industry sectors which dictate that business-critical data be retained online and accessible for many years beyond the original transaction date. Customers are running out of storage capacity and there is a need for an 'innovative and disruptive solution'.

"The partnership is a significant validation of RainStor's data retention technology from one of the industry heavyweights and extends Teradata's portfolio with advanced compression capabilities that complement the company's existing high-performance analytics appliances," says Matthew Aslett, senior analyst, enterprise software, The 451 Group. "The partnership will add another string to Teradata's bow and gives it an offering in an increasingly important and sector of the marketing.

"While we are seeing growing interest in cloud-based archiving to take advantage of cloud economics, concern over data security and governance issues man that much of the archiving remains on premise. We certainly see the market as being large enough for both approaches and given RainStor's focus on cloud archiving we see the potential for the current partnership to be extended to cloud-based archiving as customers demand it," Aslett said.