Data warehouse firm Teradata has announced that its Blurr datacentre appliance, now called Teradata Extreme Performance Appliance (EPA), is available for beta users and early adopters.

The company claimed at its 2009 Partners Conference in Washington that EPA is the world's fastest data warehousing appliance, and the first built on a solid state storage device.

Martin Wilcox, director of platforms and solutions at Teradata, explained that EPA will allow for speed improvements of up to eight times, but will come at a cost.

"Disks can only spin so fast," he said. "But most business intelligence and data warehousing is very I/O intensive. [By using sold state] we can fully exploit the hardware and let firms perform more complex database queries up to eight times faster."

Wilcox acknowledged that the appliance will cost up to four times as much as the alternatives, and is best used by companies looking to perform very intensive tasks. Such organisations will use more conventional Flash-based systems for less intensive tasks, he added, creating a mix of platforms based on need.

"When customers need to know now, they will be able to rely on the Teradata EPA to deliver sub-second responses to complex queries every time they need them," said Scott Gnau, head of development at Teradata.

"But more importantly, Teradata has combined the Flash memory speed with the nearly limitless power of the Teradata Database for the hyper-analytic data warehouse. Businesses will be able to use the instantaneous intelligence to take a commanding lead over their competitors, and then leave them behind in a blur. "

The firm also unveiled Teradata Enterprise Analytics Cloud, which it is offering in three flavours: Teradata Agile Analytics Cloud; Teradata Express on Amazon EC2; and Teradata Express for VMware Player.

Teradata will add cloud versions of Teradata Express to support up to 1TB of data and powered by Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10.

The Agile Analytics Cloud is Teradata's step into private cloud computing, and combines management with services to help application development.

"We offer the flexibility for customers to leverage the power of Teradata in any architecture they choose to meet their business need," said Gnau. "Our entry into cloud computing is an extension to our platform family, which positions Teradata for all your analytical needs."