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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.”
Teradata Launches Hadoop-Based Big Analytics Appliance
The Teradata Aster Big Analytics Appliance features Aster SQL-H software, which offers business analysts a bridge between standard business intelligence applications and on-the-fly access to big data sets stored in Apache Hadoop, leveraging the Hadoop’s new metadata catalog called Apache HCatalog. Meanwhile, the Teradata Aster Big Analytics and Discovery Platform embeds MapReduce processing for deeper insights on new data sources and multi-structured data types to deliver analytic capabilities with enhanced performance and scalability. The platform uses Aster’s SQL-MapReduce to parallelize the processing of data and applications and deliver rich analytic insights through the simplicity of structured query language (SQL) and business intelligence tools.
The new appliance also features Viewpoint Portlets, a Web-based suite of management and monitoring applications that provides Aster Database and Apache Hadoop administrators access to vital system management information. The Aster Management Console is used to configure, manage and monitor data, applications and infrastructure. An intuitive graphical interface enables easy monitoring with dashboards, views of query and process execution, and easy drill-down.
In addition, the Teradata Big Analytics Appliance features Teradata Server Management to enable users to monitor the system with diagnostic tools to quickly detect and address any issues to maximize availability. System warnings are sent to Teradata’s global customer support team, so issues can be addressed quickly. And embedded SQL and MapReduce engines provide parallel processing of data analytics.
“Big Analytics offers the opportunity for breakthrough approaches to discovery-based analytics in old data as well as in new,” said Merv Adrian, research vice president at Gartner, in a statement. “When we add big analytics to big data and begin to use information that’s in other formats other than relational database rows—like Web logs, content management systems and clouds of instruments on the Internet, we wind up with data types that are compressed into formats that first need to be teased apart for analysis. Gartner clients tell us that combining scored, processed ‘outside data’ with data inside our relational databases is where all the added value is.”
“As Apache Hadoop moves from early adopters to the mainstream, organizations require enterprise-class, unified system management and the ability to tightly integrate with their existing analytical tools to ensure success,” Rob Bearden, CEO of Hortonworks, said in a statement. “The combination of Teradata’s world-class data management and analytics capabilities, with the unmatched reliability of Hortonworks Data Platform, provides a truly unified, high-performance big data analytics architecture for the enterprise.”
Teradata and Hortonworks have worked together to design a solution for Hadoop that is easy to use and consume. The Teradata Big Analytic Appliance is engineered for the enterprise. The engineering teams have worked together to integrate Hortonworks Data Platform with Teradata products for high-performance query and metadata exchange. Additionally, enterprises can use the same trusted Teradata Viewpoint and Teradata Vital Infrastructure monitoring system to proactively monitor and manage operations within their Hadoop cluster. Customers can also benefit from a Teradata integrated support offer that includes the Horton Development Platform.
The Teradata Aster Big Analytics Appliance features a complete Aster Database, including the Aster SQL-MapReduce framework, Hortonworks Data Platform and Aster MapReduce Analytics Portfolio with more than 50 analytical functions. It runs on Teradata hardware, leverages the most current Intel processor chip technology, SUSE Linux operating system and market-leading enterprise-class storage. It can be configured to store a maximum of 5 petabytes of uncompressed user data for Aster and up to 10 petabytes of uncompressed user data for Hadoop.
“Teradata Aster Big Analytics Appliance will help customers overcome the perception that the big data analytics technology is hard to deploy and achieve business value,” said Tasso Argyros, co-president, Teradata Aster. “Teradata’s powerful platform simplifies big data analytics and is able to help data scientists develop insights that no other analytic platform can deliver.”