Netezza
Analysis of Netezza and its data warehouse appliances. Related subjects include:
Netezza Skimmer
As I previously complained, last week wasn’t a very convenient time for me to have briefings. So when Netezza emailed to say it would release its new entry-level Skimmer appliance this morning, while I asked for and got a Friday afternoon briefing, I kept it quick and basic.
That said, highlights of my Netezza Skimmer briefing included:
- In essence, Netezza Skimmer is 1/3 of Netezza’s previously smallest appliance, for 1/3 the price.
- I.e., Netezza Skimmer has 1 S-blade and 9 disks, vs. 3 S-blades and 24 disks on the Netezza TwinFin 3.
- With 1 disk reserved as a hot spare, that boils down to a 1:1:1 ratio among CPU cores, FPGA cores, and 1-terabyte disks on Netezza skimmer. The same could pretty much be said of Netezza TwinFin, the occasional hot-spare disk notwithstanding.
- Netezza Skimmer costs $125K.
- With 2.8 or so TB of space for user data before compression, that’s right in line with the Netezza price point of slightly <$20K/terabyte of user data.
- That assumes Netezza’s usual 2.25X compression. I forgot to ask when 4X compression was actually being shipped.
- I forgot to ask, but it seems obvious that Netezza Skimmer uses identical or substantially similar components to Netezza TwinFin’s.
- Netezza Skimmer is 7 rack units high.
- In place of the SMP hosts on TwinFin Systems, Netezza Skimmer has a host blade.
- Netezza (specifically Phil Francisco) mentioned that when Kalido uses Netezza Skimmer for its appliance, there will be an additional host computer, but when it uses TwinFin for the same software, the built-in host will suffice. (Even so, I suspect it might be too strong to say that Skimmer’s built-in host computer is underpowered.)
- Netezza also suggested that more appliance OEMs are coming down the pike specifically focused on the affordable Skimmer.
| Categories: Data mart outsourcing, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza, Pricing | 1 Comment |
Reports of perfectly-balanced hardware configurations are greatly exaggerated
Data warehouse appliance and software appliance vendors like to claim that they’ve worked out just the right hardware configuration(s), and that a single configuration is correct for a fairly broad range of workloads. But there are a lot of reasons to be dubious about that. Specific vendor evidence includes:
- Teradata ascribes considerable importance to a Virtual Storage technology whose main purpose is to allow mixing of heterogeneous storage devices in a single system. And the discussion rarely suggests that these parts will be in a rigid fixed relationship.
- Netezza — as Teradata keeps reminding me — often sells boxes with the expectation that they won’t be filled with data, so as to increase spindle count and hence performance.
- Oracle/Sun have dropped some comments about Exadata being more flexibly configured going forward.
- Kickfire’s new “high-end” appliance lets you attach fairly arbitrary amounts of external storage.
- And of course, software-only analytic DBMS vendors run their software in all sorts of hardware and storage environments.
What’s more, the claim never made a lot of sense anyway. With the rarest of exceptions, even a single data warehouse’s workload will contain different queries that strain different parts of the system in different ratios. Calculating the “ideal” hardware configuration for that single workload would be forbiddingly difficult. And even if one could calculate it, it almost surely would be different than another user’s “ideal” configuration. How a single hardware configuration can be “ideally balanced” for a broad class of use cases boggles the imagination.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Kickfire, Netezza, Oracle, Teradata | 5 Comments |
Oracle Exadata 2 capacity pricing
Summary of Oracle Exadata 2 capacity pricing
Analyzing Oracle Exadata pricing is always harder than one would first think. But I’ve finally gotten around to doing an Oracle Exadata 2 pricing spreadsheet. The main takeaways are:
- If we believe Oracle’s claims of 10X compression, Exadata 2 costs more per terabyte of user data than Netezza TwinFin — $22-26K/TB vs. TwinFin’s <$20K — but less than the Teradata 2550.
- These figures are highly sensitive to assumptions about Oracle’s hybrid columnar compression.
- Similarly, if Netezza or Teradata were to significantly upgrade their own compression, the price comparison would look quite different.
- Options such as Data Mining or Oracle Spatial add 12% or so each to Exadata’s total system price.
Longer version
When Oracle introduced Exadata last year it was, well, expensive. Exadata 2 has now been announced, and it is significantly cheaper than Exadata 1 per terabyte of user data, based on:
- Similar overall pricing
- Twice the disk capacity
- Better compression
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Columnar database management, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Database compression, Exadata, Netezza, Oracle, Pricing, Teradata | 13 Comments |
Facts and rumors
- Vertica is putting out a press release today touting its 100th customer, and talking of triple digit growth last year.
- Multiple sources have told me that the DATAllegro system is being thrown out of Dell, so evidently Dell is telling this to one and all. If that goes through, this would presumably leave TEOCO as DATAllegro’s single happy customer. (I haven’t checked with Microsoft for its view.)
- A rumor has it that Infiniband technology vendor Voltaire, Ltd. privately claims triple-digit sales of switches for Exadata 1 (I think that one would be one switch per Exadata installation, not per rack). Based just on a quick glance, this is far from confirmed by Voltaire’s earnings conference call transcripts or SEC filings. However, the most recent transcript does seem to indicate Voltaire got multiple Exadata deals in the telecommunications sector, and suggests some Exadata penetration in other sectors as well.
- I was told of a classified-agency user that has >1 petabyte of data on Exadata 1 and 600 terabytes or so on Netezza. My not-obviously-biased source says the agency is distinctly happier with Netezza than Exadata.
- Like ParAccel, Oracle just got dinged for TPC-related misbehavior.
- Rumor has it that Sun has no intention of helping ParAccel rerun its withdrawn TPC-H benchmark.
- ParAccel has withdrawn the claim from its home page to be the “CERTIFIED” price-performance leader. This seems to confirm that the claim was a reference to the TPC-H. In my opinion, that was a gross misrepresentation of what the TPC-H shows.
What Nielsen really uses in data warehousing DBMS
In its latest earnings call, Oracle made a reference to The Nielsen Company that was — to put it politely — rather confusing. I just plopped down in a chair next to Greg Goff, who evidently runs data warehousing at Nielsen, and had a quick chat. Here’s the real story.
- The Nielsen Company has over half a petabyte of data on Netezza in the US. This installation is growing.
- The Nielsen Company indeed has 45 terabytes or whatever of data on Oracle in its European (Customer) Information Factory. This is not particularly growing. Nielsen’s Oracle data warehouse has been built up over the past 9 years. It’s not new. It’s certainly not on Exadata, nor planned to move to Exadata.
- These are not single-instance databases. Nielsen’s biggest single Netezza database is 20 terabytes or so of user data, and its biggest single Oracle database is 10 terabytes or so.
- Much (most?) of the rest of the installations are customer data marts and the like, based in each case on the “big” central database. (That’s actually a classic data mart use case.) Greg said that Netezza’s capabilities to spin out those databases seemed pretty good.
- That 10 terabyte Oracle data warehouse instance requires a lot of partitioning effort and so on in the usual way.
- Nielsen has no immediate plans to replace Oracle with Netezza.
- Nielsen actually has 800 terabytes or so of Netezza equipment. Some of that is kept more lightly loaded, for performance.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data mart outsourcing, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza, Oracle, Specific users | 5 Comments |
Oracle gives a few customer database size examples
In its recent quarterly conference call, Oracle said (as per the Seeking Alpha transcript):
AC Neilsen, for instance, we deployed a 45-terabyte data [mart], they called it; Adidas, 13 terabytes; Australian Bureau of Statistics, 250 terabytes; and of course, some of our high-end ones that you have probably heard of in the past, AT&T, 250 terabytes; Yahoo!, 700 terabytes — just gives you an idea of the size of the databases that are out there and how they are growing, and that’s driving the need for greater throughput.
I don’t know what’s being counted there, but I wouldn’t be surprised if those were legit user-data figures.
Some other notes:
- The Yahoo database is of course Yahoo’s first-generation data warehouse, which has been largely superseded by an internal system more than 10X that size. (Edit: Actually, Greg Rahn of Oracle says below that it’s a different database.)
- I’m keynoting the Netezza road show this month, and Nielsen is up there on stage touting Netezza. (Edit: Nielsen indeed does the overwhelming majority of its data warehousing on Netezza.)
- I’d be surprised if AT&T’s largest data warehouse were “only” 250 terabytes in size. (Edit: Actually, I am told the database in question is 310 TB of user data and growing. More later, hopefully.)
- Oracle didn’t exactly say that those were Exadata installations.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, Exadata, Netezza, Oracle, Specific users, Telecommunications, Web analytics, Yahoo | 9 Comments |
Teradata and Netezza are doing MapReduce too
Netezza told me a while ago that it planned to introduce MapReduce, and agreed yesterday this was no longer NDAed. Stephen Brobst of Teradata* let slip at XLDB that Teradata has MapReduce too, apparently implemented but not yet generally available.
I don’t have details in either case. Netezza and Teradata evidently aren’t taking MapReduce as seriously as Aster Data, or even Greenplum or Vertica. But MapReduce has become pretty much of a “checkmark” item for large-database analytic DBMS vendors even so.
*Technically, Brobst is not and never has been a Teradata employee — but he’s widely and correctly regarded as being “of Teradata” even so. 
| Categories: Data warehousing, MapReduce, Netezza, Teradata | 6 Comments |
SAS on Netezza and other Netezza extensibility
I chatted with SAS CTO Keith Collins yesterday about the new SAS/Netezza in-database parallel data mining scoring offering. My impression is that this is very similar to SAS’ current Teradata support, notwithstanding SAS’ and Teradata’s apparent original intention of offering in-database modeling by now as well.
I gather this is a big performance-enhancing deal, just as it is for SPSS or Oracle’s own data mining over Oracle. However, I must confess to not yet understanding why. That is, I don’t know what’s so complicated about data mining scoring algorithms that makes hand-coding them in SQL particularly forbidding. My naive view of data mining is that you do a big regression to get a bunch of weights, and the resulting scoring algorithm is a linear combination of a few dozen variables. Evidently, that’s not quite right.
Anyhow, it turns out that SAS held off on this work until it could be done for TwinFin. That’s largely because TwinFin lets partners write code on Intel CPUs, while previously they had to write in C for Netezza’s FPGAs. I got a similar sense from at least one other Netezza partner as well.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza, SAS Institute | 4 Comments |
Bottleneck Whack-A-Mole
Developing a good software product is often a process of incremental improvement. Obviously, that can happen in the case of feature addition or bug-fixing. Less obviously, there’s also great scope for incremental improvement in how the product works at its core.
And it goes even further. For example, I was told by a guy who is now a senior researcher at Attivio: “How do you make a good speech recognition product? You start with a bad one and keep incrementally improving it.”
In particular, I’ve taken to calling the process of enhancing a product’s performance across multiple releases “Bottleneck Whack-A-Mole” (rhymes with guacamole)*. This is a reference to the Whack-A-Mole arcade game, the core idea of which is:
- An annoying mole pops its head up
- You whack it with a mallet
- Another pops its head up
- You whack that one
- Repeat, as mole_count increments to a fairly large integer.
| Categories: Data warehousing, Exadata, Fun stuff, Netezza, Oracle, Theory and architecture | 13 Comments |
Sorting out Netezza and Oracle Exadata data warehouse appliance pricing
Netezza recently announced a new generation of data warehouse appliance called TwinFin. TwinFin’s clearest stated list price is “a little under $20,000 per terabyte of user data,” which in my opinion immediately became the new industry reference point for discussing prices in the data warehouse appliance category. Vigorous discussion ensued, especially in the comment thread to the first of the two posts linked above. Here’s some followup.
Netezza should not have claimed a “10-15X price/performance improvement,” based on a 3-5X performance improvement and a 3X decrease in price/terabyte, and I should have grilled Netezza harder when it first made the claim. In fact, there is no unit of performance that you can, in a reasonable blended average, get 10-15X more of per dollar in TwinFin than you can in the predecessor NPS series.
| Categories: Data warehousing, Exadata, Netezza, Oracle, Pricing | 16 Comments |