Teradata's original mission was to support massive amounts of data. Teradata was all about harnessing powerful minicomputing and microcomputing components to serve high-volume tasks. The fundamental thinking was that someday companies might need a whole terabyte for analytics.
When you consider the progress in data management and data warehousing, the exponential growth of data is astounding. The once-enormous milestone of handling 1TB is now sometimes considered just a starter business intelligence (BI) application.
It is clear that both historical and current offerings from Teradata provide unconstrained growth in application data volumes. We provide almost limitless scale to grow your system, based on your needs. The important nuance about this scalability story is that it includes not only data volume but also many other seamless scaling opportunities. Successful BI solutions are about the future and must be unconstrained by technology limits. While predictable, growth is required for your analytics with regard to volume, concurrency, timeliness of refresh, complexity of business schema and depth of analytics. New benchmarks for Teradata scalability include certification of up to 4 petabytes, support for billions of users and predictable service levels to support real-time analytic delivery from data acquisition to query results and from decisions to action. Our shared-nothing parallel architecture and award-winning software are the foundations for this scalability.
Our unique and linear growth removes surprise costs. You can be confident that at no time in your future will you need to rebuild your servers. Nor will you need to turn away users or applications from the applications that you've built or the historical data that you've stored for analysis. You can continue to grow with expected and well-understood costs.
Teradata understands growth. Our strong foundation is still the core of our business: to provide the technology and principles to help you confidently maximize your growth potential. T
1992 — First system over 1TB went live
1996 — Demonstrated world's largest data warehouse with 11TB of data
1999 — World's largest data warehouse in production with 130TB of user data
2004 — Largest centralized data warehouse housing 423TB of data
2006 — Teradata certified up to 4 petabytes
Scott Gnau is vice president and general manager of research and development at Teradata.
Photograph by James Aranovsky
Teradata Magazine-September 2007
