Modernization Means Simplicity and Sophistication

These days, analytics software companies frequently claim to be “modern” — and they certainly claim to be as far from “legacy” as one could imagine. But few explain what “modern” actually means. Does it mean to be entirely cloud-based? Does it mean working with an analytics software provider that’s less than 20 years old? If the answer to this last question is yes, then applying the same standard to other industries can seem absurd. For example, Tesla is modern. But does that mean Audi and BMW are not?

It’s true that Teradata has been on the scene for over four decades. But as I’ll explain in this blog series, we have been and always will be at the cutting edge of data management and analytics. When it comes to being a modern data warehouse, your age really is just a number. It’s the underlying capabilities that actually count.
 

Moving to the cloud is just part of the answer

In Demystifying Cloud Data Warehouse Characteristics, Gartner analyst Ramke Ramakrishnan writes, “Modern data warehouse systems built for analytics applications are for supporting increased concurrent users and workloads. They can handle multiple types of data structures, multiple forms of data consumption — such as queries and API-based interactions — with pay-for-use pricing models. ” He also writes that “cloud data warehouses offer more variety and options on deployment due to the modernization in data storage and processing requirements.” [1]

However, not all cloud data warehouses are the same, and not all will thoroughly fulfill every enterprise’s needs. Enterprise leaders should still be vigilant about cloud data warehousing solutions that lack the sophistication of on-premise solutions. For example, it can be challenging to predict and prevent management costs and mitigate performance issues in the cloud data warehouse. Most cloud service providers are still catching up on offering advanced data management features, and enterprises may find that on-premises features get lost during the migration process.

Knowing that moving to the cloud is critical, leaders are turning increasingly to hybrid multi-cloud in order to leverage the simplicity of the cloud as well as the sophistication of on-premise solutions. This doesn’t surprise us, given that 90 percent of leaders in a 2016 survey of our customers said they wanted to deploy both on-premises and in the cloud by 2020.[2]
 

Bringing the best of both worlds together

Built for a hybrid multi-cloud world, Teradata Vantage combines the best of both on-premise and cloud data warehousing domains, providing the simplicity and sophistication that using cloud data warehousing alone lacks and that the enterprise needs.

In this blog series, I’ll go into further detail about how Vantage improves upon the six cloud warehousing capability areas that Ramakrishnan describes:

Six Cloud Wahousing Capabilities

1. Deployment — Vantage delivers the separation of compute and storage and hybrid row column store with an innovative MAPS shared-nothing architecture to deliver against discovery, analytical, and production use cases.  

 

2. Reliability — Vantage has high built-in availability to protect data against both compute and storage failures. Vantage in the cloud also delivers automated and stored backups of the complete database on durable, replicated storage.

 

3. Performance — Vantage users can adjust the quantity of compute instances (scale out/in), change instance size (up/down), and turn off compute instances to halt core operations to optimize spend (stop/start), all without having a negative impact on performance or storage.

 

4. Security — Vantage delivers fine-grained security and access controls at the object level, row, and column level and enables users to meet GDPR, PCI, HIPAA, ISO 27001, SOC 1, SOC 2, and FDA 21 certifications.

 

5. Pricing — Vantage delivers a blend pricing model that includes consumption-based and subscription-based pricing, where customers only pay for that they need, when they need it. You can also bet that enterprise CFOs will love the high level of predictability that this model provides.

 

6. Data Storage — Vantage innovates by delivering both block and object storage to deliver the highest performance and lowest cost storage options. Vantage also supports ingestion of modern data sources and data types such as Avro, Parquet, JSON, BSON, and XML. 

 
Vantage not only meets the above criteria, but it also delivers sophisticated capabilities required in a data warehouse foundation. These capabilities include support for hybrid multi-cloud deployments, integration of data management and advanced analytics (AI/ML), pinpointing access and retrieval in real-time, optimization of performance with software instead of hardware, dynamic resource allocation to manage all SLAs, and built-in 4D analytics. And Vantage delivers all of these capabilities in a services-oriented Data Warehouse as a Service (DWaaS) model across a hybrid multi-cloud environment, which is crucial to meeting the dynamic needs of the enterprise.

Gartner has listed four use cases in its 2019 Critical Capabilities for Data Management Solutions for Analytics: Traditional Data Warehouse, Logical Data Warehouse, Real-Time Data Warehouse, and Context-Independent Data Warehouse. Vantage (listed as Teradata) received the highest scores for all of these use cases.[3] 
 

Modern data warehouse defined: simple and sophisticated

It turns out that “modern” doesn’t have to mean “new.” While many new cloud data warehouse solutions certainly eliminate concerns and fulfill some modern data warehousing criteria, some present challenges when it comes to predicting cost and performance. In other words, with the cloud data warehouse, what enterprises may gain in simplicity, they may lose in sophistication.  

With Teradata Vantage, our cloud data warehouse solution fills in the gaps, providing not only flexibility and ease of multi-dimensional scalability but also the advanced data processing and analytics technologies that the enterprise needs to overcome current and future data management challenges. Vantage is both simple and sophisticated, possessing the capabilities required to meet the enterprise’s needs today and long into the future. And the best part? We’re just getting started.
 
 

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