Teradata used to offer one database that ran on its proprietary hardware in a customer’s data center. Period. Those days are long gone.

Teradata last week announced that its massively parallel processing (MPP) database now runs on multiple cloud and on-premises platforms, giving customers greater flexibility to process data where it makes most sense.

Customers can deploy the same MPP Teradata database in any environment, whether it’s on-premises, a private cloud, a managed cloud, or a public cloud, specifically Amazon Web Services (AWS), and soon Microsoft Azure. No matter the scenario, the database remains the same. Teradata uses the term “Teradata Everywhere” to reinforce this message.

“Companies now want to adhere to the laws of data gravity,” says Wayne Eckerson, principal at Eckerson Group, a research and consultancy geared to BI and analytics leaders. “That means, they want to process data in the same environment that generates the data, whether that is on-premises or in the cloud or a mix of both. Teradata Everywhere lets customers bring processing to the data rather than the other way around.”

Teradata Everywhere supports three primary use cases:

• Cloud Bursting. This enables customers to process peak workloads in a cloud platform,sparing customers the cost of purchasing bigger on-premises system.
• Disaster Recovery in the Cloud. Rather than purchase and operate a second on-premises system for back and recovery, customers can now offload disaster recovery to a public or hosted cloud.
• Cloud Data Labs. Analysts can create sandboxes on any Teradata database, whether on-premises or in the public or private cloud.

Teradata Everywhere on public and private clouds scales up to 32 nodes. The on-premises version runs on Teradata’s new IntelliFlex platform and the managed cloud option runs on Teradata’s private hosting environment. The Teradata database was previously available in non-MPP versions on VMWare and AWS.

Teradata Everywhere will be fully available with all new features by the end of the second quarter in 2017.