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By Tom Groenfeldt
Solid state devices (SSDs) -- those tiny flash drives that provide storage on MP3 devices and lightweight laptops -- are headed for the enterprise in a big way with a new product Teradata will launch in the first quarter of next year.
With the distinctly un-catchy name Teradata Extreme Performance Appliance 4555, the refrigerator-size unit the company displayed recently at the Teradata Partners User Group conference in Washington, D.C. held about 20 terabytes, all stored on racks of 300 gigabyte solid state drives. The SSDs can produce performance that is 150 times faster than a hard disk drive (HDD), a Teradata technician said in Washington, drawing interest from Morgan Stanley and RBS representatives who were listening to his pitch.
The company declined to reveal the name of the SSD supplier but did say it was a firm most people have not heard of, which presumably rules out Samsung, a leading supplier of SSDs in the consumer PC market. Teradata expects the appliance will be used in e-commerce where it can optimize online ad placements based on real-time analyses of click-through data and for manufacturing and logistics to ensure delivery to thousands of retail outlets in response to volatile consumer demand. In travel and transportation, routes and deliveries can be adjusted in response to real-time information and in telecommunications the appliance could offer security analysis of Web traffic and help spot rogue Internet addresses.
Early versions of SSDs had some issues of wearing out after repeated read/write operations. Teradata representatives said that's no longer an issue and added that the drives in the 4555 are much higher quality than the average consumer product. Because they have no moving parts, SSDs eliminate the risk of mechanical failure that HDDs present.
"When customers need to know, now, they will be able to rely on the Teradata Extreme Performance Appliance to deliver sub-second responses to complex queries every time they need them," said Scott Gnau, head of development at Teradata. "But more importantly, Teradata has combined the flash memory speed with the nearly limitless power of the Teradata Database for the hyper-analytic data warehouse. Businesses will be able to use the instantaneous intelligence to take a commanding lead over their competitors, and then leave them behind in a blur."
Gnau said the 4555's sub-second response time to queries will offer users the benefits of scalability and flexibility over alternatives such as complex event processing and in-memory analytics.
The Teradata Extreme Performance Appliance has been engineered to scan and aggregate millions of rows of data in sub-second time, perform deep analytics on select sets of data, and then provide a fast response to operational queries. The SSDs will also be a boon to firms which are concerned about power, space and cooling limits in their data centers. Solid state drives are 50 percent more energy efficient than hard disk and the appliance will take up about 7 percent of the data center floor space that a similar data warehouse would require with traditional drives. It can scale from 7 to 200 terabytes and leveraged Intel's multi-core processors and 64-bit Linux SLES 10 operating system.
David Reinsel, vice president for storage and semiconductor research at IDC, thinks SSDs will always be pricier than hard disk drives so their use in the enterprise will be for specific purposes where speed is valued.
Their high-speed access is useful in what he terms Tier Zero storage, where a hard drive spinning at 15,000 RPM just isn't fast enough. This could be in online customer service where a firm interacting with customers over the Internet need to get the data out to users fast.
Earlier this month Intel announced plans for a $120 40 GB SSD that would be used as a boot drive in servers and as storage in low-end laptops plus plans for larger 100GB and 200 GB SSDs.
"Intel's much anticipated announcement is just what the SSD industry needed," said Gene Ruther at the Burton Group. "A powerhouse company endorsing these new-fangled SSDs. Even better is that the product line spans from laptops to enterprise applications."
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