Data cruncher Teradata Corp., which has slowly but surely been expanding its Big Data analytics capabilities, has just snapped up RainStor Inc., maker of a data archiving application that sits on top of Hadoop. The deal was completed for an undisclosed sum, and underlines its growing desire to deliver enterprise-grade Hadoop solutions.

For those who don’t know RainStor, it offers a data archiving solution sits on top of Hadoop. The company was recently named by Gartner Inc. as a visionary in the June 2014 Magic Quadrant for Structured Data Archiving and Application Retirement.

Teradata said RainStor was a “powerful addition” because its technology adds key features to its own enterprise Hadoop offerings. Chief among these features are RainStor’s extremely high compression rates, which allow companies to store data for long periods of time at reduced costs. RainStor’s product allows data to be compressed by up to forty times, reducing customer’s storage footprint by up to 90 percent.

As well, RainStor adds immutability capabilities which ensure stored data cannot be changed and captured as a copy, something that should reassure customers for whom compliance and security is paramount.

RainStor’s archival capabilities will “help customers cost-effectively and efficiently address their data archiving requirements using Hadoop,” said Scott Gnau, President of Teradata Labs.

Teradata will acquire RainStor lock, stock and barrell – which means it’ll get its hands on all of the company’s assets and intellectual property, and the majority of its staff.

The deal is just the latest in a number of Big Data related buyouts for Teradata this year. So far in 2014 its snapped up Hadapt, Revelytix and Think Big Analytics. The firm has been working hard to incorporate its new acquisitions as soon as possible. Last October, Teradata launched an updated version of Revelytix’s Loom, a data-provenance and meta-data suite. In recent weeks it also launched Hadoop-as-a-service on the Teradata cloud.

The acquisitions are all part of Teradata’s strategy to ignite interest in Hadoop and put its platform in a position to deliver on it. Its competitors include legacy giants IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, who’ve all been working to add support for Hadoop in their own database tools.

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