Building a data warehouse usually means buying and
assembling general-purpose servers, storage systems, and database
software. Startup Netezza Corp. says it will debut a line of
data-warehouse appliances this week that can tackle terabyte-scale
business-intelligence applications 10 to 20 times faster than
conventional systems at half the cost.
Database marketing services company Epsilon Data Management Inc.
is testing Netezza Performance Server. "It offers us a lower-cost
alternative. And the queries do fly," says Mike Coakley, Epsilon's
marketing technology products VP.
The product combines massively parallel storage systems with
Hewlett-Packard ProLiant servers, linked by Gigabit Ethernet
connections and custom microprocessors that preprocess data before
sending it to the rack-mounted ProLiant CPUs. The system has
data-storage capacity up to 18 terabytes and runs on Red Hat Linux
and a PostgreSQL open-source database. It's available now for
$622,000 to $2.5 million.
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