Teradata's moon-on-a-stick approach: Floats on AWS and Microsoft Azure

Teradata is throwing its enterprise-class analytics database onto the public cloud, starting with rival Amazon and then Microsoft’s Azure.

Teradata Database on AWS will be offered as a service in the first quarter of 2016, and sold on a pay-per-use basis, Teradata was expected to announce Wednesday.

Until now, the publicly-held analytic data company had offered its database as a service through its own cloud as well as on prem, via its hardware for a princely sum.

Teradata has offered an Express version of its database for AWS, but this was aimed only at developers working in non-production environments.

Teradata Database on AWS sees the firm respond to customers who want to run Teradata and/or other data warehouse architectures on prem and in the cloud, specifically AWS. Not sitting on the AWS public cloud with the full-blooded database would have cut Teradata out of that particular loop.

To that end, Teradata will put go a step further next year, putting its signature database on Microsoft’s Azure by the end of 2016, it told The Register.

Veep of product and services marketing Chris Twogood told El Reg: “Right now, Amazon is the most dominant [cloud provide] in terms of customers but there are others that are of equal interest including Azure, so we will take it and deploy it to those infrastructures as well.”

‘This [AWS] is our first foray, putting Teradata into the public cloud. We will make it on prem with our own cloud, with Teradata cloud and public cloud.”

Teradata will inevitably go up against Amazon’s Redshift, released in November 2012 and a service the retailer's cloud chief estimates is AWS’s fastest growing.

Also, from later this year, Microsoft plans to open the floodgates on its own cloud big-data analytics and data warehouse with Azure Data Lake Store.

Twogood reckoned Teradata would see off Redshift because it’s used mostly in pilot projects with customers picking Teradata for production systems.

“There will be a market where people still use Amazon’s Redshift, and those who want to go into production for product analysis; well, they will lean towards Teradata,” he said.

“Teradata will not be this spring up and spin down volume that AWS is, it will be for specific departments where people want to do production analytics, and do mixed workloads, and get constant workloads – that comes from a core foundation and technology that was built exclusive for data warehousing.”

Teradata on AWS will be sold on a range of virtual servers and multi-terabyte sizes, Teradata said. Teradata Express on AWS ran on Novell SLES 10 64-bit Linux.

Teradata, whose regular database is priced in the tens-of-thousands-of-dollars range, said its as-a-service offering would be available on a pay-per-use basis. Pricing and packaging will be announced next year, Twogood said.

Teradata has been inching online for the last few years. It responded to Redshift in late 2012 by saying its flagship database would be released to the cloud. The company now has a cloud warehouse service, analytics and Hadoop running on its own cloud and on virtualised hardware. ®