“The Netezza price point”
Over the past couple of years, quite a few data warehouse appliance or DBMS vendors have talked to me directly in terms of “Netezza’s price point,” or some similar phrase. Some have indicated that they’re right around the Netezza price point, but think their products are superior to Netezza’s. Others have stressed the large gap between their price and Netezza’s. But one way or the other, “Netezza’s price” has been an industry metric.
One reason everybody talks about the “Netezza (list) price” is that it hasn’t been changing much, seemingly staying stable at $50-60K/terabyte for a long time. And thus Teradata’s 2550 and Oracle’s larger-disk Exadata configuration — both priced more or less in the same range — have clearly been price-competitive with Netezza since their respective introductions.
That just changed. Netezza is cutting its pricing to the $20K/terabyte range imminently, with further cuts to come. So where does that leave competitors?
- The Teradata 1550 is in the Netezza price range (still a little below, actually).
- Oracle basically has nothing price-competitive with Netezza.
- Microsoft has stated it plans to introduce Madison below the old DATAllegro price points; conceivably, that could be competitive with Netezza’s new pricing, although I haven’t checked as to how much it now costs simply to buy a lot of SQL Server licenses (which presumably would be a Madison lower bound, and might except for hardware be the whole thing, since Microsoft likes to create large product bundles).
- XtremeData just launched in the new Netezza price range.
- Troubled Dataupia is hard to judge. While on the surface Dataupia’s prices sound very low, you can’t use a Dataupia box unless you also have a brand-name DBMS (license and hardware) alongside it. That obviously affects total cost significantly.
- Kickfire seems unaffected, as it doesn’t and most likely won’t compete with Netezza (different database size ranges).
- For the most part, software-only vendors are free to adapt or not as they choose. Hardware prices generally don’t need to be over $10K/terabyte, and in some cases could be a lot less. So the question is how far they’re willing to discount their software.
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[…] “The Netezza Price Point” just changed. […]
What’s always confusing to me is what each vendor means by “per terabyte” – is that terabytes of uncompressed user data? Before or after indexing and all the usual massaging? What if you copy the data on multiple nodes? How do they know how many terabytes you’re loading anyway? Who keeps track?
Also is Oracle the only one left pricing per core?
I’ve posted on that twice in the past two months — e.g. http://www.dbms2.com/2009/07/02/daniel-abadi-user-data/ — and people are still confused …
Yes, vendors also publish raw disk metrics in many cases — but then they don’t call it “user data”.
Also http://www.dbms2.com/2008/09/01/estimating-user-data-vs-spinning-disk/
The cost of the host DBMS and server is pretty insignificant in the Dataupia setup. A single CPU machine running Oracle or SQL Server standard edition is all that’s needed.
MPP vendors don’t charge per core as they use too many of them.
The newer entrants into the market have led the recent move to per TB pricing.
The Teradata products with competitive pricing are not balanced sytems, so the comparisons are invalid imho.
@Curt Monash
Analytic databases are nowadays either a row store or a column store.
Do you think that in the future there will be analyic db’s that you can use both as a column store and as a row store? Or that you can even decide to store some attributes of a table in classic row-format and other in a column-format?
RC,
See http://www.dbms2.com/2009/08/04/pax-analytica-row-and-column-stores-begin-to-come-together/ 🙂
I noticed your new article. There is and was something in the air. Maybe Oracle and MS SQL will provide hybrid solutions too?
At a company as large as Oracle, Microsoft, or IBM, for any sufficiently reasonable strategy, there exists at least one fairly senior employee who not only believes it SHOULD be followed but indeed believes it WILL be followed.
So while it’s certain they’re looking at the idea, it’s impossible to predict whether they’ll follow through on it, unless one has some kind of NDA-level insight.
User data is a key price for me but user data is a confusing term. How much is actually business data.
Assuming you could by a 6TB Exadata Machine and a 6TB Netezza server at the old $60k per TB price point and you fill the servers to the very top I calculate that Oracle costs $297k per TB of business data and Netezza costs $60k per TB of business data
Prices assume Oracle 2xCompression and 50% discount from list, no Compression on Netezza.
Here how it is calculated.
System Size 6TB
Oracle With 2x Compression, Performance Server 300GB disks
2TB System Data – Temp/Redo/Archive Redo/Undo etc
2TB “User Data” – Indexes, Aggregates, Empty space in blocks etc.
2TB Business Data – Data in tables
(These figures are reflected in our Oracle 9.2 DWH DB we do not have Exadata)
Netezza No Compression
6TB Business Data
Swap space/Mirrors not presented as part of the price. No indexes or aggregates due to server speed.
Oracle Exa TB $per TB 6TB Cost
Overall 6 $99 $594
Business Data 2 $297 $594
Netezza
Overall 6 $60 $360
Business Data 6 $60 $360
NB Oracle prices calculated according to this link and I gave myself 50% discount.
http://www.dbms2.com/2008/09/30/oracle-database-machine-exadata-pricing-part-2/
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