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BI This Week
Netezza Challenges Teradata's Dominance
Netezza Performance Server doubles performance and increases
capacity to 81TB
10/22/2003
By Stephen Swoyer The dominance of NCR Corp. subsidiary
Teradata in the high-end data warehousing game is being challenged
by Netezza Corp., which takes a page out of Teradata's book by
marrying a high-performance data warehouse with proprietary hardware
underpinnings. The result, Netezza claims, is a scalable appliance
suitable for the very large data warehouse environments.
Last month, Netezza announced new entries in its Netezza 8000
line of high-end data warehousing appliances. The new Netezza
Performance Server (NPS) 8450 and 8650 configurations increase
available user data storage to 18TB and 27TB, respectively, and
boast support for total storage of 54TB and 81TB.
Netezza CEO and co-founder Jit Saxena says the new, larger NPS
appliances were developed in response to demand from customers.
"During the past several months, some of the largest, most demanding
enterprises have harnessed their exploding data and reduced their
business intelligence costs with the Netezza Performance Server
appliance," he said.
In addition to the more powerful NPS configurations, Netezza
announced a revamped version 2.0.1 release of its data warehousing
and analytic software. Netezza says it delivers performance
enhancements that expand multi-user concurrency and deliver faster
data loads and quicker analysis of time-ordered queries.
Netezza has publicly trumpeted one high-profile adopter-the J.
Craig Venter Science Foundation, which is beta testing a new NPS
appliance with software functionality optimized for bioinformatics
research-but has not touted very many, if any, customer wins in
large enterprise environments. Mike Schiff, a senior analyst with
consultancy Current Analysis Inc., says Netezza was founded in 2000
and is still attempting to grow its customer base.
"Netezza-is still a relatively young competitor, as it does not
yet have a plethora of customers to draw upon as reference sites,"
he observes, noting that the company has probably had some success
with government organizations that, for security reasons, aren't
willing to serve as customer references.
At the same time, Schiff says, the capabilities of the new
Netezza systems make the company a difficult player to ignore in the
very large data warehousing space. "By effectively doubling the
performance and tripling the capacity of its previously largest
configuration, Netezza extends its potential market reach to include
additional and even higher-end prospects," he concludes.
Stephen Swoyer is a technology writer based in
Athens, Ga. You can contact Stephen via E-mail at swoyerse@percipient-analytics.com.
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