ANSWERS

With Vantage delivered as-a-service, Teradata is the customer’s primary point of contact for any issues. This is part of the value proposition: we make it easy.

Teradata Vantage is the same software everywhere, which means you can do all the same use case in the cloud as on-premises: production analytics, test/dev, quality assurance, discovery analytics, disaster recovery, etc. Many customers prefer to use the cloud for short duration use cases such as discovery analytics – or to only pay for what they use, such for disaster recovery or proofs of concept.

All the Azure regions from which Vantage on Azure is available are listed on the Teradata website on the FAQ page in the General section. 

Our as-a-service offers are audited periodically for compliance with important standards including HIPAA, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, and SDC 1 and 2, which helps customers meet their associated privacy responsibilities, for example, under CCPA and GDPR.

Teradata Vantage Developer is a free tier of software that you can run on VMs that cost less than $1 per hour. It’s great for trying Vantage as it contains most of the core capabilities. Go to azuremarketplace.microsoft.com.

Because Teradata Vantage software is the same everywhere, Teradata customers can and are doing all the same use cases in the cloud as they are on-premises, including production analytics, test/dev, quality assurance, discovery analytics, disaster recovery, and more. With the cloud’s agility, it is especially useful for short-duration workloads such as proofs of concept and discovery.

One of Teradata’s key differentiators is that we offer the same software everywhere, which makes it easy and low-risk to migrate workloads from one environment to another (e.g. from on-premises to the cloud). We always offer the latest version in the cloud (currently Vantage 2.0 with Native Object Store) for new customers but existing cloud customers are not forced to upgrade; we do it on their preferred timeline.

Each customer’s migration to the cloud is different and timelines can vary from a few weeks to many months depending on the complexity of the environment, how much data is being moved, the amount of productivity disruption that can be tolerated at any given time, and customer responsiveness. We always recommend engaging with your Teradata account team for a tailored estimate taking into the specifics on your situation.

One of the benefits of an as-a-service subscription is that database administrators can spend less time doing non-differentiated activities (such as patches, updates, backups, and monitoring) and more time getting value from data. Vantage software is the same everywhere, so the types of analytics that can be done are consistent in every environment – and data from multiple repositories can be joined and analyzed, including data in object storage, Hadoop, operational data stores, and more.

Our as-a-service offers use hardware/storage encryption for the block storage (e.g. EBS, Premium Storage, Persistent Disk). Optionally customers can get row- or column-level encryption with 3rd party solutions such as Protegrity or Vormetric, for example.

When an instance (virtual machine) fails in a Vantage delivered as-a-service system, we replace the failed node with the “Hot Standby Node” that is usually already present. We also detach the disks and NICs from the failed node, attach it to the new node and bring the cluster up. This process typically results in ~10 mins of downtime. Once the system is up, we spin up another Hot Standby Node in the background.