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April 21, 2008
Issue 18: Teradata's "Me-too" Model 2500 – welcome to the Data Warehouse Appliance club ...finally
"Imitation is the sincerest of flattery."
— Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832), from his Lacon, Vol. I, published in 1820
Welcome to the Data Warehouse Appliance club -
another validation of an important, growing market segment
Well, well, well! "Only" eight years after Netezza coined the term and invented the market segment, Teradata today finally officially entered the Data Warehouse Appliance market. Though it’s a bit late, and certainly behind a number of other vendors, perhaps today’s entry will put an end to Teradata’s vacillating over whether they 'invented' the concept or not, were an appliance or not, or whatever. In the past couple of years, it seems Teradata spokespeople have gone out of their way to say their product was simultaneously a data warehouse appliance and absolutely not one — even booking appearances on panels of data warehouse appliance "vendors". Certainly their announcement is another validation that the role of Data Warehouse Appliances is an important and growing one not only in the current market, but for the future as well.
Derivative Marketing and a "Repackaged, Warmed-over" Product?
 Teradata is positioning this new product as being, "simple, powerful and cost-effective" — which to our way of thinking sounds much more than a little derivative from Netezza’s long-standing value proposition: "Performance, Value and Simplicity", but I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if you think so. Our reading of the Teradata announcement sounds like just another larger vendor’s "repackaging" alternative to respond to the competition. Like others before them such as IBM and Oracle, it appears that with the 2500 model Teradata has done nothing more than cobble together a collection of elements from the company’s model 5500 systems, repackaged and sold as an appliance.
Powerful. Um, How’s That Again?
And while anyone who is serious about the appliance segment of the data warehouse market (like Netezza) has focused on delivering systems that can scale to highly complex, enterprise-wide, high performance systems, we think the 2500 will struggle to deliver even modest performance for just 6 TB in a single equipment rack.While Teradata is quoting just over 6 TB of user capacity per two nodes in this new system, let’s remember that they have been advising customers for the past year not to put more than 1.5 TB against each of those same dual-core CPU nodes. Which is it? Is the 2500 underpowered for its 6 TB data capacity per dual-node rack, or has Teradata been advising its model 5500 customers to pay at least 2X too much for their data warehouse systems for the past year? Time will tell whether Teradata has made other compromises to the 2500 model in an attempt to limit its impact on its flagship products (5500 and the new 5550). Beyond its underpowered nodes, have they sacrificed anything else like workload management or system availability, or even the system's ability to handle highly-interactive, operational applications? As the days and weeks help raise the shroud covering the model 2500 further, we’ll know more. For now though, it just feels like "me-too" imitation.
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Posted by Phil Francisco at April 21, 2008 9:30 AM
I think you may have mis-read the press release.
Also if you go back in history...Teradata was the original appliance in its inception and morphed over time into a virtualized edw. Also the TD 550 handles 6TB for $67k per tb. The 2500 handles 142 TB for $125k per tb.
Posted by: Gary Cogdill at April 21, 2008 5:21 PM
Gary,
Thanks very much for your comment. I'm not exactly sure what the error was in my reading of the Teradata release to which you were referring.
As for the Teradata system prices and conclusions, I believe it was Curt Monash's blog posting (http://www.dbms2.com/2008/04/21/teradata-2500-5550-appliances/) that discussed those. I simply provided him with some rough guideline information about Netezza’s entry-level systems - and all the Netezza Performance Server systems that we sell make use of our Asymmetric Massively Parallel Processing (AMPP) architecture.
On your other points:
+ It is true that Teradata claims the 2500 models are capable of scaling to 146 Terabytes of user data (albeit in a 24-rack lineup!). My point of reference in the posting was the per-rack capacity of 6+ TB of the new Teradata "appliance".
+ At the same time, Teradata is now telling customers to put up to 3 TB of capacity up against each node in the 2500 model systems. Those are the same nodes that until very recently they were advising customers not to scale beyond 1.5 TB/node. [As a current point of reference, even in their 5500-series datasheet that went along with Monday's announcement (http://www.teradata.com/t/pdf.aspx?a=83673&b=180748 - see "5500C" column in the table on p.3), they are advising customers not to load up more than 2 TB of user capacity on each of these very same nodes.]
+ Lastly, on the notion that "Teradata was the original appliance in its inception...", it is true that Teradata began with a much more tightly coupled system architecture, but that alone would not have made it an "appliance". Back a DM Review article from 2005, William McKnight shared some thoughts along the same lines as it pertains to Teradata, and to former players such as Britton Lee and Sequent (http://www.dmreview.com/issues/20050301/1021502-1.html).
IMO, the simplicity of installation, operation and deployment, along with the economy those traits make possible are also fundamental to the notion and market success of the purpose-built Data Warehouse Appliances (http://www.beyeblogs.com/netezza/archive/2007/01/issue_3_what_is.php). Certainly, because they relied on so much custom-designed hardware (in the days before off-the-shelf FPGAs and open interface standards) those were not leading characteristics of the initial Teradata systems. Also in terms of terminology, I believe the notion of a "Data Warehouse Appliance" per-se was not in the lexicon of the industry until Netezza coined it just a few years ago.
Posted by: Phil Francisco at April 22, 2008 11:57 AM
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