In-Depth
Netezza Challenges Teradata’s Dominance
Netezza Performance Server doubles performance and increases capacity to 81TB
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.
About the Author
Stephen Swoyer is a Nashville, TN-based freelance journalist who writes about technology.