Teradata Launches Hadoop-Based Aster Big Analytics Appliance

Teradata announced its new Teradata Aster Big Analytics Appliance, which features integrated support for Apache Hadoop.

Teradata has announced its Aster Big Analytics Appliance, which brings together open-source Apache Hadoop and Teradata Aster into a single, integrated and optimized appliance.

Leveraging Teradata Aster SQL-MapReduce and Aster SQL-H, the Teradata Aster Big Analytics Appliance offers users access to Hadoop and provides business analytics to a broad set of knowledge workers. The appliance offers prepackaged ready-to-run analytical functions, such as digital marketing optimization, social network analysis, fraud detection and analysis of machine-generated data in just hours, said Chris Twogood, vice president of product and services marketing for Teradata.

Twogood said the Teradata Aster Big Analytics Appliance is designed for demanding analytics, which require more computational power, memory and data movement. This appliance offers up to 19 times better data throughput and performs analytics up to 35 times faster than a typical off-the-shelf commodity bundle, Teradata said. The Teradata Aster Big Analytics Appliance has ample memory and high bandwidth interconnects to support extreme analytic execution, and it is packaged to require less space in the data center than off-the-shelf offerings.

"The Teradata Aster Big Analytics Appliance offers the faster path from diverse big data acquisition to big insights, and seamlessly delivers these insights to the business owners," Scott Gnau, president of Teradata Labs, said in a statement. "Unmatched by any other stack in the industry, it enables organizations to overcome the barriers to big data analytics and provides a high-definition view of the business to optimize operations."

Industries such as retail, ecommerce, consumer packaged goods, communications and financial services needing deeper insights into consumer behavior can use the new Teradata appliance capabilities to harness multi-structured data from social media, Web clickstream, Twitter streams, call center activities and other types of customer interaction data. When these industries tap digital channels, they have a more accurate picture of their consumers' interests, needs and motivations to buy and sentiment toward their brand, Teradata said.

However, game-changing insights are achieved by using the Teradata Aster Big Analytics Appliance to combine the analysis of the digital channels with more structured customer data from point-of-sale systems, Twogood said. Retailers can benefit from a comprehensive discovery platform with ultra-fast investigative analytics.

"We integrate this from both a hardware and software perspective," Twogood said of the new appliance. "We don't really see a lot of competition out there because of this. The closest competitor is probably EMC with their Greenplum appliance and MapR Hadoop solution, but they didn't do software integration to the extent that we have. There's also Oracle with their big data appliance, but that's just a data dump appliance."