Big Data is simply a fact of life for most IT groups and according to a McKinsey report published earlier this year, the average growth rate across enterprise applications is 40% which is in stark contrast to the average growth of IT budgets, now hovering at 5%. More recent survey findings from DBTA, (part of Unisphere Media) who polled over 600 respondents claim that among organizations managing 500TB or more of data, a majority report that the growth is a result of both business demand, as well as a proliferation of data warehouse and business intelligence (BI) applications.
Data warehouses are on the front lines of the Big Data trend and according to the survey findings: Many respondents report increasing issues in the performance of their applications as a result of data growth. However, many still look to hardware additional server and storage systems as the way to handle prolific, near-petabyte or multi-petabyte data.
The survey also goes on to point out that: As data grows, the reflex reaction by most organizations is to buy and install more disk storage. Close to one-third now embrace tiered storage strategies, and only one out of five is putting information lifecycle strategies into place to better and more cost- effectively manage their data.
Throwing more hardware at the Big Data problem is not the best approach. Aside from the obvious Opex costs, not to mention the damaging effects on the environment, there has to be a better way to corral the never-ending generation of more data let’s be honest, it’s not going to slow down for quite some time.
Here at RainStor, we believe we know a little bit about corralling big data and at the same time avoid compromising what the business needs, which is continued access to large historical data for better reporting and analysis. According to the same DBTA survey, 25% report that they hold on to data forever, indefinitely. Data retention requirements are not going away, and Big Data is demanding some control.
As Teradata partners we are excited to announce that RainStor for Teradata forms the perfect complement to Teradata’s Data Warehouse by allowing even more data to be retained in support of compliance requirements or deeper historical analysis. Included with RainStor for Teradata is a FastConnect capability, which makes moving data bi-directionally between a Teradata database and RainStor achievable at the highest possible rates.
Data retained in RainStor benefits from high rates of compression that comes from patented value and pattern de-duplication capabilities and the data can be stored on your choice of low-cost storage platforms and environments. This significantly multiplies the amount of data that can be retained online in support of Teradata analytics. On an ongoing operational basis, this cost can be up to 10x less per Tb. Of course, the tradeoff is that the data stored within RainStor is best suited for direct SQL access and can be viewed with standard BI tools. To perform more complex analytics you can rapidly move data back into Teradata without missing a beat.
As an added bonus, the same RainStor database and infrastructure can act as a primary repository for large amounts of machine-generated data that does not require complex analytics. This can include data from communications call data records, logs and so on. RainStor’s ability to ingest at high rates, extreme compression rates and on demand query-able access, scalability and low administration provides the most cost-efficient means of retaining and managing this type of data.
RainStor is sponsoring and exhibiting at Teradata Partners conference next week, so if you would like to learn more about RainStor for Teradata please reach out to us here or stop by our booth – # 615.