Datawarehouse and business analytics firm
Teradata plans to unveil a
data storage management system around the middle of next year that
will speed up customers' ability to access large volumes of data at
high speed from different types of storage media, including solid
state.
Stephen Brobst, Teradata's CTO, said at the firm's user
conference in Istanbul that users would be able to keep their
existing disc drives and add bigger drives that would lower the
average cost per terabyte stored as their volumes grew.
Solid state system, which was working in the lab, is more
expensive that magnetic storage. But the trick would be to work out
which 20% of the data was used 80% of the time, and to put that
into solid state storage to maximise efficiency. "We have a tool
that will do that automatically." said Brobst.
Brobst said data volumes were growing very fast, but so was the
need to analyse it quickly enough for the organisation to take
advantage of events. Organisations had less and less time to
respond to customers because the internet was speeding up
everything, and competition meant there were usually plenty of
other suppliers the customer could use.
This was driving the need for faster access, which meant moving
to solid state storage systems. Until recently, these had been too
expensive. The input/output (I/O) system was also a bottleneck, he
said.
Consumerisation via the iPod and digital photography was driving
down the cost of flash memory, Brobst said. He expected the price
curve to approach that of spinning memory, but not to cross it,
around the middle of next year.
He also expected Intel to incorporate the disc I/O system on the
chip, which would crack the bottleneck problem, at around the same
time.
"We will definitely announce the new storage management system
at the end of May 2010, but we may not announce the solid state
system because we are waiting on others for release dates," Brobst
said.
The new storage management system will allow users transparent
access to disc drives with different capacities. This was an
essential step to incorporating the solid state storage seamlessly
into the data warehouse, he said.
He said the announcement would "virtualise" Teradata's data
warehouse and analytics system. "Think of it as an internal cloud
system, because that is what it will look like to the user," he
said.