Teradata Boosts Data Warehouse Appliance Speed

The Active Enterprise Data Warehouse 5600, announced Friday, offers a 65% jump in performance over previous versions of the appliance, Teradata said.

Key speed elements in the new 5600 model include a quad-core Xeon processor based on the Nehalem microarchitecture that includes an integrated memory controller. The 5600's processor enhancement, additional main memory and faster data storage subsystem enables 65% higher performance, according to the vendor.

The storage subsystem is the Teradata Enterprise Storage 6844, which boosts data throughput in the data warehouse by 30%. The system's virtual storage software enables customers to configure 146 GB and 300 GB drives to store data to meet usage patterns of attached BI technology.

Other speed enhancers include the Teradata BYNET subsystem that increases processor interconnect bandwidth by 2.5 times over previous generations of the Active Enterprise Data Warehouse. In addition, the latest model includes faster backup, archiving and data restoration. A key component of the system's data protection features is Symantec's NetBackup technology.

In the middle of this year, Teradata plans to launch an all solid-state drive version of its Extreme Performance Appliance, which comprises analytics and a data warehouse. The use of SSDs will significantly increase performance, according to the vendor.

SSDs are expected to play an increasingly larger role in Teradata hardware in the future. At its partner conference in October, Teradata said I/O speeds with SSDs are 520 MB per second versus 15 MB/s on the company's fastest conventional disks. The I/O is expected to increase when the company moves from the SAS 1.0 interface to SAS 2.0.

The company also plans to move to 10 Gb Ethernet for external connectivity on all its equipment to improve load performance.