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.”