Data – always growing and changing, that’s for sure.  The advent of Big Data technologies has made a permanent impact to the enterprise, how they architect data, how they use data, and how they store data.  One of the offsets of that is that many companies have had to rethink their data archival plan.  Enterprises commonly put data on tape, a medium that is really a tech remnant that has been around too long.  Though the medium itself is cheap, there are many costs to using it including storage, cataloging, personnel, and a very realistic speed limit.  It’s hard to search and it is a bear to operate.  RainStor is changing the way customers access this historical data, dramatically reducing the cost of Big Data storage.  This is a big deal to the world’s largest banks, telcos, utilities, etc., many of which are RainStor customers.  The product is called RainStor FastForward, and it allows customers to re-instate massive amounts data from Teradata tape drives over to RainStor drives.  Companies can then query archive information with flexibility and speed.

The secret is RainStor’s unique database technology and its powerful FastConnect utility which enables rapid bi-directional movement of data to and from the Teradata database.  The RainStor product itself is an enterprise-grade database, with all the security features you would expect from products in this class, such as encryption, LDAP integration, roles-based utilities, and audit capabilities.  RainStor is designed for mass-scale, but runs on even the lowest-cost hardware including native on Hadoop.  It is agnostic to storage and hardware and it is also very efficient, implanting some impressive data deduplication rates of up to 97%.  Once on FastForward, customers see incredible improvements on query speeds for this archived data, and they can still rely on a wide array of query options for the data such as standard SQL, Pig, Hive, and MapReduce.  The takeaway is that RainStor’s customers have been finding it very easy to fundamentally change how they archive data and gaining tremendous abilities to incorporate rapid data querying, helping them achieve new analytic targets, comply better with regulatory measures, and lower the cost of managing data altogether, particularly by eliminating tape-based data retention.

So here’s what it looks like – Teradata is an enterprise data warehouse solution that is capable of generating multiple petabytes of historical data in many cases.  That’s data that for one reason or another is retained on tape.  By implementing FastConnect, that tape-based data is easily integrated into the RainStor system – securely, very efficiently, ready for access with no special hardware needed.  That “active archive” can run in the cloud, on-premise or natively on HDFS, the Hadoop Distributed File System.  FastForward makes that rapid query access possible with fast, flexible queries and management.

“The RainStor solution helps our customers tame the data beast, including traditional historical data and massive volumes of big data,” said Chris Twogood, vice president, Product Marketing, Teradata. “The RainStor solution is integrated and supports the Teradata Unified Data Architecture, providing the ability to retain an online archive where the data is immediately available to users.  Our customers now have the option to archive their data at a fraction of the cost and they don’t have to transfer it to tape drives or throw it away.”

It only makes sense that data archives transform into the current decade and anytime a product flexibly and efficiently makes a process easy to consume, it’s going to answer a lot of questions out there.  It can only be expected as data volumes continue to grow that archives need to make that transformational leap.  As use cases for data analysis become more powerful and commonly implemented, they can only extend to the body of archive data and such a product enables that integration well.