Netezza
Analysis of Netezza and its data warehouse appliances. Related subjects include:
Bottleneck Whack-A-Mole
Developing a good software product is often a process of incremental improvement. Obviously, that can happen in the case of feature addition or bug-fixing. Less obviously, there’s also great scope for incremental improvement in how the product works at its core.
And it goes even further. For example, I was told by a guy who is now a senior researcher at Attivio: “How do you make a good speech recognition product? You start with a bad one and keep incrementally improving it.”
In particular, I’ve taken to calling the process of enhancing a product’s performance across multiple releases “Bottleneck Whack-A-Mole” (rhymes with guacamole). This is a reference to the Whack-A-Mole arcade game,* the core idea of which is:
- An annoying mole pops its head up.
- You whack it with a mallet.
- Another pops its head up.
- You whack that one.
- Repeat, as mole_count increments to a fairly large integer.
| Categories: Data warehousing, Exadata, Fun stuff, Netezza, Oracle, Theory and architecture | 24 Comments |
Sorting out Netezza and Oracle Exadata data warehouse appliance pricing
Netezza recently announced a new generation of data warehouse appliance called TwinFin. TwinFin’s clearest stated list price is “a little under $20,000 per terabyte of user data,” which in my opinion immediately became the new industry reference point for discussing prices in the data warehouse appliance category. Vigorous discussion ensued, especially in the comment thread to the first of the two posts linked above. Here’s some followup.
Netezza should not have claimed a “10-15X price/performance improvement,” based on a 3-5X performance improvement and a 3X decrease in price/terabyte, and I should have grilled Netezza harder when it first made the claim. In fact, there is no unit of performance that you can, in a reasonable blended average, get 10-15X more of per dollar in TwinFin than you can in the predecessor NPS series.
| Categories: Data warehousing, Exadata, Netezza, Oracle, Pricing | 19 Comments |
What does Netezza do in the FPGAs anyway, and other questions
The news of Netezza’s new TwinFin product family has generated a lot of comments and questions, some pretty reasonable, some quite silly. E.g., I’ve seen it suggested privately or publicly that
- Netezza’s older products only handle one query at a time (nonsense, and I’m going to loyally protect the identity of the person who emailed that odd suggestion to me)
- A Netezza node can be a single point of failure (also nonsense, although performance degradation from a node failure might be considerable)
- Netezza has a cache consistency problem (also hardly true, except insofar as it’s an issue to overcome in future development as Netezza moves toward parallelizing bulk loads, transactional updates, and/or trickle feeds).
Netezza’s Phil Francisco addressed some points of this nature in a recent blog post.
More reasonable is the question:
Now that Netezza has changed its architecture, what are all those FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays) being used for anyway?
The short answer is: Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza, Theory and architecture | 6 Comments |
Netezza’s worldwide show-and-tell
In this economy, conference attendance is way down. Accordingly, a number of vendors have reevaluated whether it makes sense to have a traditional big-bang user conference, or whether it might make more sense to do a tour, bringing their message to multiple geographical areas. Netezza has opted for the latter course, something I’ve been well aware of for two reasons:
- Planning for the conferences and for Netezza’s product roll-out is of course coordinated, and product roll-out is something I advise my clients on.
- Netezza engaged me to speak at six different versions of the event (i.e., America and Europe, but not the Far East). There’s still time to contribute suggestions about my talk here.
Apparently, I’ll be talking late morning each time. My dates are:
- September 2, Boston
- September 9, Washington, DC
- September 15, Milan
- September 17, London
- September 24, San Francisco
- September 29, Chicago
The brand name of the events is Enzee Universe. Locations, registration information, and other particulars may be found on the Enzee Universe website.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza, Presentations | 2 Comments |
Netezza is changing its hardware architecture and slashing prices accordingly
Netezza is about to make its biggest product announcement in years. In particular:
- Netezza is cutting prices to under $20K/terabyte of user data, with even lower numbers promised for the near future.
- Netezza is replacing its PowerPC chips with Intel-based IBM blades.
- There will be substantial changes in how data flows between the various parts of a Netezza node.
- Netezza claims this will all produce an immediate 10-15X increase in price-performance, based on a 3X cut in price/terabyte and a 3-5X improvement in mixed workload performance. (Edit: Netezza now agrees that it shouldn’t have phrased things that way”.)
Allow me to explain. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza, Pricing, Theory and architecture | 35 Comments |
Netezza on concurrency and workload management
I visited Netezza Friday for what was mainly an NDA meeting. But while I was there I asked where Netezza stood on concurrency, workload management, and rapid data mart spin-out. Netezza’s claims in those regards turned out to be surprisingly strong.
In the biggest surprise, Netezza claimed at least one customer had >5,000 simultaneous users, and a second had >4,000. Both are household names. Other unspecified Netezza customers apparently also have >1,000 simultaneous users. Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza, Teradata, Theory and architecture, Workload management | 13 Comments |
Oracle cites Exadata wins
A couple of weeks ago, Oracle put out a press release about Exadata wins. Highlights include:
- 20 names of actual customers.
- One quote citing a competitive win (over Netezza)
- One quote citing a ~50X speedup of one query “without manual tuning”
- One quote citing consistent 10-72X query performance speedups
- One quote citing a speedup from “days” to “minutes”
Unless I missed it, none of the quotes implied Exadata was actually in production, and none compared hardware between the old/slow/production and Exadata/fast/test systems.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Market share and customer counts, Netezza, Oracle | Leave a Comment |
Xtreme Data readies a different kind of FPGA-based data warehouse appliance
Xtreme Data called me to talk about its plans in the data warehouse appliance business, almost all details of which are currently embargoed. Still, a few points may be worth noting ahead of more precise information, namely:
- Xtreme Data’s basic idea is to take a custom board and build a data warehouse appliance around it.
- An Xtreme Data board looks a lot like a conventional two-socket board, but has only one four-core CPU. In addition, it sports some FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays).
- In the Xtreme Data appliance, the FPGAs will be used for core SQL processing, after the data is ingested via conventional I/O. This is different from Netezza’s approach to FPGA-based data warehouse appliances, in which the FPGA sits in the place of a disk controller and touches the data first, before passing it off to a more or less conventional CPU.
- While preparing entry into the data warehouse appliance business, Xtreme Data has sold its board to 150 other outfits, many quite impressive. Buyers seem to be FPGA users who previously had to craft their own custom boards. According to Xtreme Data, major uses by these customers include:
- Military/intelligence/digital signal processing.
- Military/intelligence/cybersecurity (a newish area for Xtreme Data)
- Bioinformatics/high-throughput gene sequencing (a “handful” of customers)
- Medical imaging
- More or less pure university research of various sorts (around 50 customers)
- … but not database management.
- Xtreme Data’s website has a non-obvious URL. 🙂
So far as I can tell, Xtreme Data’s 1.0 product will — like most other 1.0 analytic database management products — be focused on price/performance, without little or no positive differentiation in the way of features.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza, Theory and architecture, XtremeData | 6 Comments |
My current customer list among the analytic DBMS specialists
(This is an updated version of an August, 2008 post.)
One of my favorite pages on the Monash Research website is the list of many current and a few notable past customers. (Another favorite page is the one for testimonials.) For a variety of reasons, I won’t undertake to be more precise about my current customer list than that. But I don’t think it would hurt anything to list the analytic/data warehouse DBMS/appliance specialists in the group. They are:
- Aster Data
- Greenplum
- Infobright
- Kickfire
- Kognitio
- Microsoft
- Netezza (my biggest client this year, probably, because of all the Enzee Universe appearances)
- Sybase
- Teradata
- Vertica
- Attivio, which may or may not be construed as being in the analytic DBMS business
- Clearpace, ditto
All of those are Monash Advantage members.
If you care about all this, you may also be interested in the rest of my standards and disclosures.
| Categories: About this blog, Aster Data, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Infobright, Kickfire, Microsoft and SQL*Server, Netezza, Sybase, Teradata, Vertica Systems | 4 Comments |
Netezza Q1 earning call transcript
I finally read the Netezza Q1 earnings call transcript, put out by Seeking Alpha. Highlights included:
- Netezza got 14 new-name accounts and 21 follow-on deals. Average sale in both groups was right around $1 million.
- The economy is tough, deals are slipping, and nobody knows for sure what will happen.
- Netezza’s main head-to-head competitors are Oracle and Teradata. Netezza claims good but not perfect win rates against each, but concedes that those vendors (especially Oracle) of course get other deals Netezza never sees.
- Netezza characterizes Teradata as offering its multiple product lines, trying to upsell many customers from cheaper to more expensive product lines, and being selectively aggressive about pricing. None of this is surprising to me.
- 80% of Netezza’s Q1 revenue, and perhaps even a higher fraction of new-name accounts, was in four vertical markets: “Digital media,” telecom, government, and financial services.
- Some time over the next few months, Netezza will give at least some more clarity about future products.
One tip for the Netezza folks, by the way, from this former stock analyst — you should never use the word “certainly” about a deal you haven’t closed yet. “Almost surely” could be OK, but “certainly” — well, it certainly was not the thing to say.