Netezza Aims High and Low with Data Warehouse Appliance
By Matthew Aslett

Data warehousing appliance specialist Netezza Corp is set to add to its portfolio of Netezza Performance Server (NPS) products with new models aimed at warehousing requirements large and small.

The Framingham, Massachusetts-based company's chief executive officer, Jit Saxena, told ComputerWire that Netezza is looking both high and low to expand its range of appliance models, which currently ranges from the 1TB NPS 8025 to the 27TB NPS 8650.

"The biggest appliance we sell supports up to about 30TB of big business data, many of our customers are saying they need bigger," he said. The result will be a new high-end model supporting up to 100TB of user data, which will be delivered later this year, he said.

While Netezza's success has initially come from businesses running data intensive applications with large volumes of data, the company also sees the need for its fast data warehousing capabilities at the low end of the scale. "Some companies say they have the same issues at the half a terabyte level," said Saxena.

"They still have the problems that the big businesses have," added Dave Kloc, Netezza country manager for Northern Europe, citing examples of two Netezza customers in the UK: wireless telecoms services provider Orange, which has in the region of 15 million subscribers; and virtual telecoms network operator Caudwell Communications, which has about 700,000 subscribers.

Both have turned to Netezza's combined hardware, database, and storage appliance for their data warehousing needs after seeing the performance improvements that the appliance model provides, according to Netezza.

That performance improvement is based on the combined architecture of the Netezza appliance model, said Saxena, which differentiates it from data warehousing rivals such as IBM Corp, Oracle Corp, and NCR Corp's Teradata division.

"The people we are competing with are people who have had a traditional approach to this market, coming from transactional environments and making incremental changes to improve business intelligence," he said, adding that data warehousing environments typically involve a variety of vendors supply the database, server, and storage components.

As well as vendor complexity, this also invariably mandates a solution where the database server is separated from the storage, causing performance problems, according to Saxena. "The basic innovation is that on every disk incorporated in the system there's a huge amount of intelligence," he said.

"In traditional systems, typically data moves from storage to the storage cache, to the operating system, and operating system cache. The unnecessary data movement on the backplane of those machines is what hogs the performance. We do that right next to the storage, and as a result we have at least an order of magnitude better performance," he added.

That architecture could also enable the company to expand the user base for its appliances, Saxena said, responding to requirements for security and regulatory requirements. "We believe that as we move along the hardware sitting next to the storage could include authentication and encryption without impacting performance," he said. "That is just an example of what this architecture could do."

In the meantime, Netezza is having rapid success with the existing functionality. The privately held company exceeded its first and second year booking goals since it began shipping product in January 2003, and expects to do the same this year, with a revenue goal of $100m for the full year.

After four rounds of funding that have brought in $68m in total, the latest of $15m in January 2005, the company is also "fully funded," according to Saxena, and is heading steadily towards a potential public offering.

"We are building the business, and a natural outcome would be a public offering when the markets are right," he said. "You have to do the public offering when you are ready and the market is ready."