Teradata to support Hortonworks Data Platform

Gearing up for the opening of Hadoop Summit 2013 in San Jose, Teradata and Hortonworks are announcing the extension of their strategic partnership today. The result is that Teradata will no longer be just a data warehouse vendor but will, in effect, become a full-fledged Hadoop company, reselling and supporing the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) Hadoop distribution.

Brand-wise, Teradata is introducing the "Teradata Portfolio for Hadoop," which manifests itself into four separate options: The Teradata Appliance for Hadoop, the Teradata Aster Big Analytics Appliance, the Teradata Commodity Configuration for Hadoop and Teradata Software Only for Hadoop.  The two appliance products are being presented as premium platforms, and the remaining two as commodity platforms.  All four of them will be based on HDP.

The Teradata Commodity Configuration for Hadoop is based on Dell hardware, and must be purchased directly from that company.  Teradata will configure and support the hardware once it's been acquired.  According to Teradata, it developed the Commodity Configuration with Dell to optimize the hardware for HDP.  Meanwhile, the Dell iron will come in at a lower cost than Teradata's dedicated appliances.

Teradata Software Only for Hadoop, meanwhile, is geared to customers who wish to procure and configure their own hardware, install HDP on it and yet do so in a manner where the software is fully supported by Teradata customer service.

As Hadoop matures, it looks very much as if it will become more of an embedded component than a discrete product.  In the case of Teradata's offerings, Hadoop is becoming an embedded support competency as well.  My guess is that other companies will follow suit.