Netezza looks to cut cost of data warehousing
New appliance is a third the price of previous models,
By Eric Lai, Computerworld (US) | Computerworld US | Published: 05:04, 03 August 2009
Netezza is to release a data warehousing appliance to run on faster blade server-based hardware.
The new appliance will be called the TwinFin, after a type of surfboard. The fourth generation of Netezza's data warehousing appliances, the TwinFin will be able to store up to 1 petabyte of user data and run faster than the prior 10000-series appliances because of its use of Intel-based IBM blade servers, according to Phil Francisco, vice president of product marketing,
It will cost about $20,000(£11,930) per TB of user data, even when configured with fast SCSI drives, said Francisco, compared with $60,000(336,000) per TB with the 10000-series appliances.
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One of the first of a wave of data warehousing appliance vendors that emerged about five years ago, Netezza has about 300 customers. It competes with longtime vendor Teradata and recent entrant, Oracle which introduced its own Database Machine last year.
Francisco said the new blade servers, combined with Netezza's Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chips for accelerating data throughput, will enable the TwinFin to run two to five times faster than the 10000, which he claimed "will stretch our performance lead over the Oracle Database Machine."
The TwinFin also beats the Database Machine's all-inclusive price of $33,000-per-TB, and will approach the $16,500-per-TB list price of Teradata's Extreme Data Appliance 1550 announced last year.
Analyst Curt Monash said other data warehousing vendors, such as XtremeData, have also released appliances at the same price range as the TwinFin, and that Microsoft via its acquisition of DATAllegro, plan to do so.
Netezza plans to release three other models in the same family as the TwinFin.
