Teradata Portfolio for Hadoop Looks to Ease Big Data Deployments

The promise of harnessing big data for business insight and competitive advantage has drawn many organizations to explore Apache Hadoop over the past several years. But expertise in deploying, managing and using Hadoop can be hard to come by and expensive. Analytic data solutions company Teradata hopes to change that with its new Teradata Portfolio for Hadoop, a set of Hadoop-based product platforms, software, consulting services, training and customer support.

“We’re taking Hadoop from Silicon Valley to Main Street,” says Chris Twogood, director of Product and Services Marketing at Teradata. “We focused on answering the question, ‘How do we make it easy for companies to integrate Hadoop into their enterprise data architecture.”

“Teradata is now off and running as a trusted single source for all things Hadoop with many leading customers such as Dell, Inc., Otto Group, PT XL Axiata Tbk mobile telecommunications, Swisscom Schweiz AG, and Wells Fargo Bank,” adds Scott Gnau, president of Teradata Labs. “We built the Teradata Portfolio for Hadoop to support organizations struggling with Hadoop implementations by taking the complexity and cost out of deploying and managing the solutions.”

Teradata worked closely with Hortonworks, one of the major contributors to the Apache Hadoop project, to develop the portfolio.

“Teradata and Hortonworks have extended their strategic partnership to allow Teradata to resell and offer support for Hortonworks Data Platform,” says Rob Bearden, CEO of Hortonworks. “Working together, we are simplifying the deployment of Apache Hadoop and enabling customers to leverage all their data to create substantial business value. Now Teradata can offer the proven 100 percent open-source Hortonworks Data Platform, customer support, and direct access to the latest technologies coming from the Apache Hadoop community.”

Teradata Unveils Two Turnkey Hadoop Appliances

Twogood explains that the Teradata Portfolio for Hadoop is intended to address a range of implementation needs, from IT organizations that want turnkey, ready-to-run solutions to engineering-led IT departments that want to build their own systems, but have Teradata in the background for support.

For IT departments that prefer the turnkey approach, the Teradata Portfolio for Hadoop has two premium platforms: Teradata Appliance for Hadoop and Teradata Aster Big Analytics Appliance.

The Teradata Appliance for Hadoop is a tightly integrated hardware and software appliance that Teradata has optimized for enterprise-class data storage and management. It sports the latest generation of Intel technology and a combination of Mellanox InfiniBand fabric-based hardware and Teradata BYNET V5 software.

Teradata says it provides enhanced reliability with its customer service and Teradata Vital Infrastructure, which it says proactively detects and addresses 70 percent of any system failures. It also provides out-of-the-box NameNod high availability for seamless failover. For manageability, it has added new Hadoop portlets to its Teradata Viewpoint web-based system management portal.

Meanwhile, the Teradata Aster Big Analytics Appliance brings together the Teradata Aster Database, SQL-MapReduce and Apache hadoop. Teradata has optimized it for data discovery, with more than 70 pre-packaged analytic functions and optional nodes of Hadoop. Like the Teradata Appliance for Hadoop, it features a combination of Mellanox InfiniBand fabric-based hardware and Teradata BYNET V5 software.

Hadoop Offerings for Commodity Hardware

For customers that want to use commodity hardware for the Hadoop deployments, Teradata has two additional offerings: Teradata Commodity Offering for Hadoop and Teradata Software Only for Hadoop.

For Teradata Commodity Offering for Hadoop, Teradata partnered with Dell and Hortonworks to offer a lower-cost, standard hardware configuration optimized for the Hortonworks Data Platform. Teradata says customers can work directly with Dell on purchase and installation, and Teradata will support the Hortonworks Data Platform software and configure the system to integrate with the Teradata Unified Data Architecture.

Finally, for customers who want to source, configure and optimize their own hardware, Teradata is offering Teradata Software Only for Hadoop. Teradata will fully support these customers with its customer service.

As part of the new portfolio, Teradata has expanded its customer services and Teradata Big Data Consulting Services. Teradata serves as the single point of contact for customers for all hardware and software, with the backing of Hortonworks’ technical support team and engineering team. Teradata Consulting Services combines and integrates consulting capabilities across the Teradata Integrated Data Warehouse, Teradata Aster Database and Apache Hadoop environments.

Thor Olavsrud covers IT Security, Big Data, Open Source, Microsoft Tools and Servers for CIO.com. Follow Thor on Twitter @ThorOlavsrud. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline, Facebook, Google + and LinkedIn. Email Thor at tolavsrud@cio.com