Products

Data Warehouse Appliances

Philip Howard of Bloor Research says,

"Netezza owns the entire stack: it puts hardware components together specifically to support data warehousing and it builds software specifically to exploit the features of hardware."

Data Warehouse Appliances

Netezza's approach to data warehousing

To eliminate the need for constant tuning and the technology bottlenecks caused by slow disk transfer I/O rates, slow network transfer rates and inefficient caching, Netezza developed a system designed specifically for analytical processing on extremely large amounts of data. We call our system an “appliance” because, like a network or storage device, it was designed to do one thing extremely well. It is very straightforward – when you plug it in and load your data, it analyzes it very fast. And because the Netezza appliance is an integrated database-server-storage system, you are no longer faced with building your own system out of disparate components, or maintaining these different piece parts.

Netezza’s patented massively parallel architecture takes a different approach than a traditional database architecture to processing queries. Where standard computing architectures are targeted at operations on individual data elements, the Netezza architecture is all about "streaming" processing. Rather than shuttling data between disk and memory for processing once a query comes in, which creates the bottleneck, data streams off the disk and through query logic loaded into an FPGA (field programmable gate array).

The FPGA and processor (a PowerPC chip), together with 400 GB of disk storage, reside on each of the massively parallel nodes that Netezza calls snippet processing units (SPUs). Each of our Netezza racks contains 112 of these SPUs. Queries are optimized across the SPUs for maximum performance and power efficiency A Linux host server aggregates SPU results and manages query workload and the results are returned to the user.

It is this different approach to the growing analytic processing challenge that provides our customers with a high-performance database engine that brings simplicity to what has become a very complicated process.

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