Analysis

posted on 21 April 2008 10:11

Business intelligence and data warehousing supplier Teradata OEM's LSI Engenio arrays. Great; a normal enough relationship, but there is a convoluted history here and both companies used to be part of the same company, one that started out making cash registers.

Ironic, as it's customer buying data that Teradata stores on its LSI-sourced arrays and analyses with its software.

So ... once upon a time NCR (National Cash Register) earned revenue selling cash registers. It made a good living and expanded into many things, including ASICs, tape systems, parallel-processing systems and much more. AT&T bought it in the nineties but it already had an ASICs group so it sold that part of NCR to Hyundai, the Korean conglomerate, which formed Symbios Logic from it.

NCR worked its way into business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing with its Teradata operation, storing and analysing the terabytes of data generated by mass business customer transactions. It used a massively parallel computer architecture to do this faster than anybody else and provided its own drive arrays to store the data, ones sourced from what was previously its own operation. Thus the Teradata:Engenio relationship started in the early nineties.

Hyundai, in common with other Asia technology companies, hit the buffers when the Asian economies got into trouble in the late nineties. It sold off the Symbios Logic unit to LSI which was looking to expand. LSI called the storage part Engenio. It transpired that LSI wanted the ASICs part but the storage arrays didn't fit its core strategy at the time so the Engenio unit, under Tom Georgens, was prepared for an IPO.

Then LSI got into trouble and a new CEO came on board, Abhi Talwalkar. He surveyed the company and pulled the IPO. Georgens went to NetApp where is is COO. The Engenio branding went away and LSI continued supplying drive arays to Teradata and has gone from strength to strength.

In October last year Teradata, under CEO Michael Koehler, completed a spin-off from NCR and is now an independent company and the leading one in the enterprise BI market. It's strategy is to sell its own integrated hardware (servers and storage) and software to around 850 enterprises world-wide so they can better analyze their customer data and tune their product offering to extract more value from those customers.

It doesn't sell its BI intellectual property to run on commodity servers or storage. The company takes three arrays from LSI: the 6287 SMP array for its symmetric multi-processing server; the 6843 Enterprise Storage array with Fibre Channel drives and 4Gbit/s Fibre Channel support; and the 9204 Backup-To-Disk array using SATA drives.

(Teradata will also sell EMC DMX arrays.)

It looks to be a nicely stable business relationship and one that could well move towards using 2.5-inch and SAS drives to get more IOPS from a drive array module, and possibly also to solid state drives (SSD) to get very much faster I/O from a storage array; both qualities of array performance that Teradata might well value highly.

Teradata CTO Stephen Brobst says that Teradata software clasifies data in a temperature spectrum with hot data being the most frequently accessed. The EMC flash memory solid state disk tier in Symmetrix looks extremely interesting to him as a storage medium for hot data.

Less so 2.5-inch disk drives though. He indicated that their price was perhaps not low enough yet and customer CFOs would jib at paying the difference. Teradata is putting a lot of R&D effort into multi-temperature data management in software, technology to lower the IOPS need, and that relieves any pressure to go 2.5-inch to get more IOPS from a drive module

^{[Chris Mellor.]}