Scalability emerged as the main theme of the analytics world last week as key vendors upped the ante on the capacity of their respective platforms in the fight over enterprise spending. Teradata Corp. went down the density route with the launch of a new number-crunching appliance that packs up to four times as much storage as its predecessor.

Also included in the chassis is a pair of E5-2697 v3 chips from Intel Corp.’s newest line of server processors to help organizations take advantage of the additional space. That provides the ability to accommodate large workloads that once had to be spread out over multiple systems, which not only frees up power and flooring for more hardware but also helps reduce the associated management overhead in the process.

That’s an alluring prospect for organizations struggling to accommodate the vast amounts of information coming off the connected universe in their data centers, but the kind of consolidation that Teradata promises differs from the bigger trend in the market, which is to distribute data across scores of cheap servers. That’s a task that WANdisco Plc. promises to ease with the new version of its replication technology, which also debuted last week.

Fusion, as the software is called, can synchronize Hadoop clusters across different geographic locations to prevent scenarios in which a localized outage at a facility renders the data inside inaccessible for the entire organization. It’s the same concept as the company’s earlier software, except that that the functionality is now implemented one degree of separation further from the analytic core to simplify maintenance.

That’s a major benefit in view of how notoriously complicated it is to run Hadoop environments even without a third party replication technology running on top, but managing data infrastructure doesn’t have to be such a chore, at least not according to the cloud-based analytics crowd. CenturyLink Inc. officially joined that camp last week with the acquisition of a database-as-a-service provider called Orchestrate Inc. for a reported $10 to $12 million.

The startup’s namesake platform combines five different non-relational systems under a unified web interface that allows developers to exploit the unique strengths of each without worrying about the technicalities. The technology puts CenturyLink in a better position to compete over analytic applications with rivaling cloud providers such as IBM Corp. that have also been aggressively targeting that use case.