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BI This Week
Appliances for Business Intelligence
TDWI's Director of Research examines Netezza Performance
Server
4/2/2003
By Wayne W. Eckerson A sure sign of the maturity of any
technology market is the advent of plug-and-play "appliances" that
pre-integrate components to deliver a cost-effective data center
system that is easy to set up, use, and mange.
Netezza, a Framingham, Massachusetts-based start-up is betting
that the business intelligence market has matured to the point where
organizations will see the logic in swapping expensive data center
platforms consisting of separate storage, servers, and database
systems for its "tera-scale data appliance" that combines
off-the-shelf versions of these components in a single,
rack-mountable cabinet.
Target Markets
The Netezza Performance Server is geared to support complex
analytic queries against large volumes of detailed data. It delivers
10 to 20 times the performance at half the cost in these types of
environments, according to company officials. The Netezza 8100
Performance Server, which pre-integrates hardware, storage, and a
SQL database, costs $622,000 and installs in less than one day.
Not surprising, there has been significant interest in the BI
appliance from organizations that have not been able to justify the
high costs of loading, storing, and querying large volumes of
detailed operational data. One significant market for Netezza is
analytic service providers who perform complex analytics on client
data.
"We manage and analyze large databases for our clients and the
Netezza Performance Server has shown dramatic performance
improvements over our existing systems," says Mike Coakley, a vice
president at Epsilon, a database marketing services provider.
Epsilon is consolidating numerous client-specific data marts onto a
single Netezza BI appliance. "Queries are running eight to 200 times
faster and we can now refresh a data warehouse with tens of millions
of records in 15 minutes."
Other target markets for Netezza include telecommunications firms
that want to analyze call detail records; financial services firms
that need to analyze risk, fraud, or credit card trends; and retail
firms that would like to perform detailed market basket analysis,
among others.
Netezza's Magic
Netezza lowers total cost of ownership because it uses
off-the-shelf components, such as Linux servers, gigabyte Ethernet
switches, Pentium processors, Compaq servers, IBM disks, and an open
source database it has modified to work with its architecture. The
system provides fast query performance because it performs many
common query-processing tasks in specialized computer chips located
on arrays of massively parallel disk drives within its storage
subsystem. Netezza's patent-pending technology essentially blends
the best of both SMP and MPP processing to optimize query
performance against large volumes of data.
Since it supports SQL, ODBC, and JDBC, the Netezza appliance
works with most analytical tools on the market today. To date,
Netezza has established formal partnerships with Microstrategy,
Business Objects, and SPSS, with others to come.
Free Demos
Netezza officials understand that most organizations are loathe
to change their internal BI platforms, and thus they often face an
uphill battle to win customers. However, they say organizations are
eager to hear their story when they face a costly upgrade to their
hardware, storage, or database system or need to create a BI
infrastructure from scratch in a new project.
To evangelize its BI appliance, Netezza performs proof-of-concept
(POC) demonstrations free of charge. Netezza will gather customer
data and queries and test them on systems in its labs. Customers can
then bring the system in house to validate the lab results in their
own environment. The only caveat in the validation phase is that
customers must commit to buying the system if it matches the
laboratory performance.
Currently, Netezza has three paying customers, including Epsilon
and a telecommunications services firm. It has shipped systems to
two other prospects and is conducting numerous POCs. If Netezza is
right and the BI market is mature, expect this start-up to have a
dozen customers by mid-year and several imitators ready to ship BI
appliances in the near future.
For more information, see http://www.netezza.com/
Wayne W. Eckerson is Director of Research for The Data
Warehousing Institute, where he oversees TDWI's educational
curriculum, member publications, and various research and
consulting services. He has published and spoken extensively on
data warehousing and business intelligence subjects since
1994.
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