Teradata has quietly purchased database virtualization vendor xkoto for an undisclosed sum.
Teradata confirmed the acquisition was completed last month. Though
Teradata is not saying much publicly about its rationale, xkoto’s
GRIDSCALE product load balances all the database servers in a cluster
using an active-active arrangement. Based in Boston, xkoto’s technology works on Microsoft SQL Server and IBM DB2.
Utilizing a shared-nothing architecture, GRIDSCALE
virtualizes a pool of database servers so that they
appear to be a single, consistent server to the applications they
serve.
“It’s hard to speculate on why Teradata made this acquisition,”
Forrester Research analyst James Kobielus told eWEEK. “Teradata already
has excellent HA (high availability), load balancing and scalability
within and across their analytics-oriented product portfolio. Perhaps
they’re looking to extend those same features out to distributed grids
of Teradata and third-party databases.”
“Certainly, many of Teradata’s customers use
many databases, such as hub-and-spoke enterprise DWs (data warehouses)
where Teradata may be the hub, but other DBMSs are deployed as
front-end data marts, and yet others are deployed in the staging layer
to ingest and process unstructured content, perform data cleansing, and
the like,” he continued. “The xkoto DBMS virtualization technology, if
extended to such heterogeneous mixed-DBMS EDW ecosystems, could be a
strong asset for Teradata to hold onto its accounts and grow their
Teradata footprints while allowing customers the flexibility to deploy
a growing range of third-party DBMSs…(and) file-based persistence platforms in a robust cloud or grid.”
Matt Aslett, an analyst with the 451 Group, predicts Teradata will
use the buy to build a version of GRIDSCALE that supports Teradata’s
database software and eschew development of the product for SQL Server
and DB2.
“Teradata says it will use xkoto's technology to accelerate its
product development plans, and the virtualization technology would
appear to complement the acquirer's Agile Analytics Cloud strategy to
create virtual data pools,” Aslett wrote in a report on the deal.
Late last year, Teradata introduced the ability for users to
dynamically provision virtual data marts within the Teradata Enterprise
Data Warehouse or across the larger data-warehousing estate using the
self-service Elastic Marts Builder tool, he said. In addition, the
company also delivered Teradata Express for Private Cloud and Public
Cloud – limited versions of the Teradata Database that run on VMware
and Amazon Web Services' EC2, he said.
“Meanwhile, xkoto was looking to take its virtualization
capabilities beyond the datacenter by providing active-active database
clustering for continuous availability across data centers, as well as
data transformation,” he wrote. “There would appear to be an
opportunity for Teradata to make use of the GRIDSCALE technology to
provide replication between Teradata Database instances within the
Agile Analytics Cloud, both on-premises and on cloud platforms.”
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