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 Netezza
Tuesday 18th March
2003
Last week Netezza announced that one of its partners, Epsilon
(which is a company specialising in relationship management - CRM,
SRM and so forth), had gone into production with solutions based on
the Netezza Performance Server.
As yet, Netezza is not widely known. It is a US-based company
that was established in 2000 and which announced the availability of
the Netezza Performance Server (NPS) in September last year.
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A D V E R T I S E M E N T |
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Netezza comes out of the same mould as Teradata and WhiteCross,
in that it has purpose-designed a database machine (that is
database, server and storage) to support business intelligence and
analytic applications that go much faster than conventional data
warehouses and provide a better return on investment. In its
marketing literature Netezza claims to offer 10 to 20 times the
performance at half the cost of existing systems.
As always, of course, marketing claims should be treated with
care but this is plausible and, indeed, in some instances it is
likely that even better performance will be achieved. The company's
other claim, that the Netezza Performance Server is "the first
purpose-built, tera-scale data appliance" is more dubious. Why do
you think that Teradata called itself that in the first place? To be
fair, terabytes were only dreamed about when Teradata was started up
in the late '70s.
The architecture of NPS is based on a combination of SMP and MPP
hardware, which Netezza refers to as AMPP (asymmetric massively
parallel processing). Basically it consists of a Linux-based server
plus what the company calls Snippet Processing Units (SPUs), which
provide massively parallel storage, combining both hardware and
streaming database logic.
Record level operations, locking, logging and storage management
are all provided on SPUs, which are linked to the server via a
Gigabit Ethernet connection. Table and set operations are handled on
the server by the database operating system. At the front-end this
supports standard SQL 92, ODBC, JDBC and so on and the company also
provides a fast loader for data input.
Apart from differences in the architecture, Netezza also differs
from both Teradata and WhiteCross because it does not offer its own
business intelligence solutions, just a platform upon which you can
deploy third party products. Thus Netezza has a significant partner
programme, of which Epsilon is one example. Others include
MicroStrategy and SPSS and you can, in principle, deploy any third
party BI or analytics product onto the Netezza Performance
Server.
The question, of course, is how attractive this product will be
in the market. So far the evidence is encouraging. It has raised
venture capital funding in a difficult market, it has attracted IT
luminaries such as Ed Zander (ex-Sun) onto its board, and it has a
number of industry partners already signed up.
In theory, the big issue should be whether people want to buy
proprietary hardware and the answer is that they probably do not.
But Netezza has skirted this issue by only requiring specialised
equipment at the storage level, which is likely to be less of a
problem. Moreover, the bandwagon in favour of Linux is rolling along
nicely so this should not be an issue either.
In effect, therefore, Netezza is less proprietary that either
Teradata or WhiteCross and, in any case, the latter no longer
actively markets its hardware. More potentially dangerous
competitors are other go-faster data warehousing technologies such
as those provided by Aruna, Aleri and column-based relational
database vendors such as Alterian, Kx Systems, Sand Technology and
Sybase. However, most of these (Sybase IQM is the main exception)
have not been designed to support the terabytes of data that Netezza
will happily manage.
Netezza is more or less brand new and it remains to be seen how
successful it will prove. Nevertheless, the early signs are
promising.
Phil Howard
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