Welcome

Netezza pioneered a burgeoning market sector in 2003 with the Netezza Performance Server (NPS), the world's first data warehouse appliance. Our leadership drives a scramble among competing vendors as they bring similar solutions to market. At a high level, today's data warehouse appliances are similar to Netezza's latest appliance, the TwinFin. Each integrates (with varying degrees of success) database, server and storage into a single system. The similarities, however, end there.

Netezza founded this product category on the premise that enterprises foster latent hunger for a true analytic data warehouse appliance. To qualify this product requires minimal set-up and administration, is easy to use and manage, and delivers the industry's best price-performance. In our view, a true appliance becomes the technical differentiator between those organizations succeeding by putting analytics to work and others struggling to get analytics to work.

As companies awaken to the promise of the data warehouse appliance concept, vendors have attempted to capitalize on the growing awareness by repackaging yesterday's platforms for today's and tomorrow's needs. With so many options to choose from, companies may find it difficult to distinguish true analytic data warehouse appliances from their similar brethren.

From yesterday's NPS to today's Twinfin, Netezza has used the data warehouse appliance criteria below to guide the development of our appliance offerings. We hope you'll find these criteria valuable as you evaluate your next data warehouse infrastructure purchase.

A true data warehouse appliance is:

• Purpose-built for performance – True appliances should deliver high analytic performance out of the box, with no indexing or tuning required. As an appliance, all of the integration of hardware, software and storage is done for you, leading to faster time to value for advanced analytics.
• Simple to use – like a kitchen appliance, a data warehouse appliance should be dramatically easier than traditional systems. It should simplify analytics by consolidating all analytic activity in the appliance, right where the data resides. Easy to install, deploy and maintain – with installation in hours and the ability to have a large DW up and running in a day or so. No tuning, indexing, partitioning, aggregations, etc. required.
• Low total cost of ownership – appliances should be less costly to own and maintain – even for a large enterprise warehouse implementation of 100s of terabytes or more.
• Enterprise compatibility – high availability; plug n' play integration; standards-based interfaces; fully-integrated with all major Data Integration, Business Intelligence and advanced Data Analytics vendors.
• Low power, cooling and space consumption – delivering high-performance in a compact footprint without blowing your data center's budget for electrical power and without forcing your IT director to implement "skip-a-row" equipment patterns to manage the data center cooling.

With these simple criteria in mind, we encourage you to evaluate your vendors carefully. The data warehouse infrastructure is a critical part of maintaining a company's strategic edge in a competitive marketplace. An open, transparent Proof-of-Concept is one of the best ways to gauge an appliance's ability to deliver real-world results in your unique environment. If a vendor is unwilling to participate in such an essential comparative test, question that vendor's ability to provide a true analytic data warehouse appliance.