Data warehouse appliances
Analysis of data warehouse appliances – i.e., of hardware/software bundles optimized for fast query and analysis of large volumes of (usually) relational data. Related subjects include:
- Data warehousing
- Parallelization
- Netezza
- DATAllegro
- Teradata
- Kickfire
- (in The Monash Report) Computing appliances in multiple domains
Oracle Exadata and Oracle data warehouse appliance sound bites
In addition to my previously posted thoughts on the Oracle Exadata/data warehouse appliance announcement, let me offer some more concise observations.
- Microsoft had leapfrogged Oracle with its DATAllegro acquisition. Now Oracle’s back in the game.
- But Oracle Exadata Release 1 is hardly going to put Teradata, Netezza, or Greenplum out of business.
- After long denying it, Oracle has finally admitted that putting more than 10 TB on Oracle had been an extremely painful thing to do.
- Oracle’s idea of splitting database processing between a couple of types of server is a smart one, and is consistent with what multiple other vendors are doing.
- Medium-long term, the Exadata technical strategy could work very well. Exadata storage management addresses some of the problems with shared-everything; Oracle RAC addresses other; and it may not take many releases before Oracle gets query parallelization right as well. Edit: This point is superseded by my updated take on Oracle query parallelization.
- Now Oracle and Microsoft are both supporting Infiniband for high end data warehousing.
- Oracle’s Exadata-based appliance doesn’t have the out-of-the-box simplicity that other appliances and analytic DBMS do.
- Licensing details aren’t yet clear, but Oracle Exadata’s list price probably won’t be terribly appealing either. Of course, nobody in their right mind pays Oracle list prices anyway.
- New web-based businesses have no reason to buy the Oracle data warehouse appliance. Exadata makes sense only for established enterprises.
Contradicting all that potential goodness, Oracle has been making ringing anti-shared-nothing statements, such as the silly:
There are “speed-of-light issues” associated with … scale-out-style grids
That mindset doesn’t auger well for Oracle to ever be a fully competitive high-end data warehouse DBMS vendor.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Oracle | 5 Comments |
Oracle announcements next week, data warehouse appliance, 11g R2 or otherwise
Eric Lai and Chris Kanarcus put up an article on Oracle’s announcements next week. Much of the speculation revolved around generic grid/clustering, with more detail than I posted yesterday. Most interesting to me was the last section of the article, which sounds as if it could be talking about the same thing Luke Lonergan referred to in a comment thread when he said:
Oracle is about to unveil a secret project that uses HP DL185 servers as storage devices with some predicate pushdowns to implement a data warehouse “appliance”.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Oracle | 1 Comment |
Netezza overseas
22% of Netezza’s revenue comes from outside the US, at least if we use last quarter’s figures as a guide. At first blush, that doesn’t sound like much. Indeed, percentage-wise it surely lags behind Teradata, Greenplum (which has sold a lot in Asia/Pacific under Netezza’s former head of that region), and a few smaller competitors headquartered outside the US. But a few conversations I had today suggest a rosier view. Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Kognitio, Market share and customer counts, Netezza, Teradata | Leave a Comment |
Netezza application areas
I’m at the Netezza “Enzee” user conference in Orlando. So one or more Netezza posts are in order.
One theme of the brief analyst meeting was Netezza’s increasing business focus on vertical markets. In particular, Netezza is hiring managers for a range of vertical markets. The commercial ones cited (at various levels of maturity) included: Read more
| Categories: Application areas, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Market share and customer counts, Netezza, Telecommunications | Leave a Comment |
Teradata sound bites
In connection with Teradata’s attempt to get into the Netezza news cycle with an appliance product announcement, I’ve whipped up a few Teradata-related sound bites suitable for quoting.
- Teradata has been in the data warehouse appliance business since 1984. I’m glad they’re finally admitting it.
- Teradata’s users love them. The users’ bosses, who sign the checks, aren’t as thrilled. Price competition is a big issue for Teradata.
- Teradata pricing has caused some real resistance, and even anger. Price is the big reason some startups are growing so much faster than Teradata. Ease of installation is sometimes a second factor.
- Teradata isn’t going to win many price-per-terabyte shootouts. (Note: I mean price per terabyte of user data.)
- The 5-10X+ performance advantage isn’t as crazy as it sounds, at least for some use cases. Teradata does still get a lot of business, and wins some price/performance shootouts to get it.
- Many Teradata customers are buying newer analytic DBMS as well. But they aren’t throwing out Teradata. Most stories of Teradata replacements are misunderstandings.
- The analytic DBMS startups all still do most of their business supporting data marts. If you have a high-concurrency workload, you usually need more mature technology. That’s where Teradata shines.
- That said, the very largest data warehouses are usually really data marts. High-concurrency BI is usually run against somewhat smaller databases.
- The upper limit for data warehouse sizes is skyrocketing. In 18 months, we’re seeing the largest known production systems go from under 1 petabyte of user data to multiple petabytes.
- Teradata has more competition for the very largest databases than it used to, which are now being found in relatively young web companies even more than in old-line telcos, retailers, or banks.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Teradata | Leave a Comment |
Teradata decides to compete head-on as a data warehouse appliance vendor
In a press release today that is surely timed to impinge on the Netezza user conference news cycle, Teradata has come out swinging. Highlights include:
- Teradata, which long avoided the “appliance” term, now says it sells both “data warehouse appliances” and “data mart appliances.” Indeed, it claims to have “invented the original appliance” — which is pretty close to being true.*
- Teradata claims its “new appliance easily delivers up to 5 to 10 times performance improvement over competitors’ appliances,” at $119,000 per terabyte US list price.
- Teradata claims a 150% faster “scan rate” than competitors. Teradata is surely thinking of Netezza when saying that.
- Teradata claims 10X performance improvement on “selected queries” vs. the “competition.”
- Teradata thinks its geospatial data management capability is better than competitors’, and that this is an important indicator of Teradata’s general overall greater sophistication.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, GIS and geospatial, Netezza, Teradata | 4 Comments |
Some Netezza customer metrics
From the conference call based on Netezza’s July, 2008 Q1, as of the end of Q1:
- There are now 191 Netezza customers.
- 18 of those were new.
- 78% of Netezza’s business was in North America and 22% was international.
- Netezza operates in 10 countries.
- “The top 4 vertical markets represented approximately 75% of our business, with those markets being telcos, retail, financial services, and the analytic service provider segment. “
- One analytic service provider was greater than 10% of revenue for the quarter, and is expected to keep buying a lot in subsequent quarters. Also, one analytic service provider standardized on Netezza. I’m guessing that’s the same customer.
- “We ended the quarter with 45 [quota] carrying teams made up of a sales rep and a systems engineer and our plan is to continue to hire direct sales teams at the pace of 3 to 5 per quarter every quarter. These direct reps accounted for 85% of the business while the indirect activity was 15% this quarter.”
| Categories: Application areas, Data mart outsourcing, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Market share and customer counts, Netezza, Telecommunications | 1 Comment |
Teradata’s major vertical markets in 2007
From a May, 2008 earnings conference call transcript:
- telecommunication, media and entertainment industry is 28%;
- financial services is 24%;
- retail is 19% of our revenues last year;
- manufacturing 9%;
- government 7%;
- travel and transportation 6%;
- and healthcare 5%.
| Categories: Application areas, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Telecommunications, Teradata | Leave a Comment |
Teradata/Netezza/Tesco kerfuffle
Netezza evidently put out a press release bragging of a competitive replacement of Teradata at UK retailing giant Tesco. That press release cannot be now found on Netezza’s site, but it lives on elsewhere. Meanwhile, Teradata has put out a press release in which Tesco is quoted emphatically contradicting what it is quoted as saying in the Netezza press release. While I haven’t discussed this with Netezza, my guess is that somebody there got a little overenthusiastic in advance of their user conference next week and thought they’d gotten a permission they really hadn’t.
Beyond that, I’d note that the Netezza quote made reference to around 25 heavy analytical users, while the Teradata quote talked of 8000 people across more than 2000 suppliers.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Memory-centric data management, Netezza, Oracle, Specific users, Teradata | 2 Comments |
Greenplum is in the big leagues
After a March, 2007 call, I didn’t talk again with Greenplum until earlier this month. That changed fast. I flew out to see Greenplum last week and spent over a day with president/co-founder Scott Yara, CTO/co-founder Luke Lonergan, marketing VP Paul Salazar, and product management/marketing director Ben Werther. Highlights – besides some really great sushi at Sakae in Burlingame – start with an eye-opening set of customer proof points, such as: Read more