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.
Netezza's approach to benchmarking
Although we talk about performance gains of 50-100x (or more), the truth about Netezza benchmarks is that there aren’t any. The performance numbers quoted by us are the findings of prospective Netezza users. Because our systems are so easily deployed, we encourage prospective buyers to test our systems at their site, using their queries, running against their data based on their own workload. Independently audited bench tests provide some insight and strong sense of independence, but for exactly the same reason that you would never a buy a car without road-testing it first, Netezza emphasizes on-site testing.
Unlike vendors who might limit full disclosure into their systems’ installation, tuning and operational complexity by running tests in their own controlled test/demo environment, Netezza provides the customer visibility into the proof of concept process, from delivery on the customer’s loading dock to installation, data loading and through completion of the final customer benchmark tests. This type of benchmark testing allows the customer to more accurately predict how the various competing systems will behave in their own production environment.
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