Lots of clues elsewhere in this blog. Index-light MPP architectures such as Netezza’s or DATAllegro’s are waaaay better for large data warehouses than traditional index-heavy SMP systems like Oracle or Microsoft SQL*Server.

More debatable is the choice between FPGAs (Netezza) and more conventional chips (pretty much everybody else). Both choices have a lot of merit.

CAM

Also several of their customers gave presentations at their business track sessions disclosing their DW
deployment and reported performance gains of 2 and 3 orders of magnitude. So something is missing in the
technical analysis just comparing disk data rates which on average cannot go faster than 70 MB/s. Any clues??

They still both have those orientations, but neither is nearly as extreme any more as they were.

CAM

Just read another article that put Netezza’s power consumption at around 30W per SPU. Since each SPU has one disk, that equates to 30W per disk.

Our nodes use around 420W each and have 12 disks, so that’s 35W per disk. Our P Series gets slightly more usable space per disk than Netezza, so the consumption per TB is about the same.

If we compare to our C series, we get around four times the capacity per disk, so power consumption per TB is much lower.

Stuart
DATAllegro

According to your post, Netezza claims two major advantages from their use of FPGAs: 5X performance and lower heat and power consumption. Both are very easy to refute.

On performance, our latest version pretty much maxes out the disks at around 70MBps each. This is when running queries, not just simple table scans. Based on recent proof of concept projects, we’ve seen that Netezza does roughly the same. However, our performance is achieved through the use of smart software on commodity CPUs, rather than their combo of a CPU and an FPGA.

IMHO, our performance is even more impressive when you consider that we have just two dual-core CPUs for every twelve disks. In contrast, Netezza uses one CPU and one FPGA for every disk. Hence, our CPU:disk ratio is 1:3 compared with Netezza’s 2:1.

This goes a long way in explaining our price advantage - our CPU cost per disk is much lower and this feeds directly into a significant advantage on both price/performance and price/capacity.

It also leads to a refutation of their supposed heat/power advantage. A single FPGA certainly does use less power than a dual core Xeon CPU. However, a typical Netezza installation uses far more chips for a given performance and capacity level.

To be specific, a Netezza 8650z has 33TB capacity and uses 672 SPUs with one Power CPU, an FPGA and one disk each. That’s a total of 1,344 ‘CPUs’ and 672 disks. In contrast, a DATAllegro P33 has 33TB capacity and uses 66 nodes with 2 dual core CPUs and 12 disks each for a total of 132 dual core CPUs and 792 disks.

With a similar number of disks being scanned at a similar rate, the two systems will have similar performance (until we take into account our sophisticated multi-level partitioning, which gives us a huge performance advantage on most queries). However, our system has less than one tenth the number of CPUs. I don’t know how much power Netezza’s FPGAs use, but I doubt it’s less than a tenth of that used by one Xeon.

Our P33 is also less than half the price.

Stuart