Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Data will be processed far faster and analyzed and used more quickly, while requiring less energy in doing so, thanks to solid state drive systems reportedly being developed by Teradata Labs that will likely be available to customers by late 2010 or early 2011.

 

As ContactCenterSolutions has reported, Teradata recently unveiled a working SSD prototype that promises to offer more than double the performance, extremely fast analytics, and at 50 percent of the energy consumption of standard electro-mechanical drives that use magnetic tape, known as high-density disks.

 

SSD provides superior performance because it does not have delays in the reading or writing of data, which is inherent in conventional HDDs, according Scott Gnau, chief development officer, Teradata. They also have high levels of mechanical reliability. The lack of moving parts almost completely eliminates the risk of mechanical failure.

 

“The beauty of Teradata’s parallel architecture is that it was designed to leverage industry-standard technology,” said Gnau, pictured right. “Teradata’s file system, automated data management, intelligent query optimizer and virtualized database kernel allow us to be market leaders in integrating new innovative technology.”

 

Contact centers may be one of the first to benefit from SSD deployment on the back end. Transactional and operational data like that handled by contact centers in active data warehousing applications, featuring short and quick inputs and outputs, are ideal for SSDs, said Jim Dietz, Teradata’s product marketing manager for platforms. That’s because the amount of data handled is low and that it can be easily accessed. On HDDs the speed to get that information may depend where it is on the tape as data is stored sequentially.

 

Teradata does not plan to abandon HDDs. Large amounts of data and applications such as data backups, data scanning, and analytics, are best handled on them. They have higher density and greater storage than SSDs.

 

In anticipation of SSDs, and in response to and in anticipation of growing data handling needs, Teradata recently enhanced its current HDD-based solutions with the new Teradata Virtual Storage technology that automatically and intelligently manages data storage and retrieval. Teradata Virtual Storage places the most frequently used or “hot” data on the fastest storage and the least used or “cold” data on the slowest storage without user or administrator intervention.

 

As data usage changes over its lifetime, Teradata Virtual Storage automatically moves it to the most appropriate storage location. For example, financial services firms can collect and analyze data for immediate business insights then archive the data to respond to compliance requests generated from regulators years later.

 

Teradata has also launched the new first new product with Teradata Virtual Storage, the Teradata 13.0 database, which provides an overall performance improvement of up to 30 percent. Teradata 13.0 allows customers to mix and intelligently manage different sizes and types of disk drives within a single system. Companies can utilize larger, less-expensive disk drives without sacrificing user performance. In addition, customers can add storage to prior generations of hardware.

 

When the SSDs become available, customers will be able to leverage the price and performance of storage technology that best meets their business and budget needs thanks to the Teradata Virtual Storage architecture. Customers will be able to choose from an SSD-only appliance configuration or mix SSD drives with traditional hard drives in a single, integrated Teradata enterprise data warehouse. Hot data will be placed on the faster drives such as SSDs, while cold data will be placed on slower drives. This hybrid approach, enabled by Teradata Virtual Storage, is the most cost-effective way it says to balance performance and storage costs.