September 27, 2007
Four anonymous Netezza fans
I just found a blog post asking about Netezza that elicited quite a few responses, including at least four that purported to be from people whose companies had selected Netezza in a POC (Proof Of Concept) bake-off. One says Netezza was super-fast, even over DATAllegro, and DATAllegro’s professional services were lacking. One says Netezza is 50X faster than traditional alternatives on some queries, but up to 2X slower on some others. Two others just expressed love (or at least commitment) without giving details.
I haven’t yet looked through the rest of the responses in the thread.
Categories: Analytic technologies, Benchmarks and POCs, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DATAllegro, Netezza
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3 Responses to “Four anonymous Netezza fans”
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Curt,
The anonymous post that refers to us is quite old. We looked into it about a year ago and couldn’t figure out who it could be.
The performance figures are way off anything we’ve worked on and certainly don’t reflect the current situation. In general, Netezza is a little faster on single query runs and we are faster and more consistent under real-world concurrency. Also, we’re typically around half the price and have a smaller footprint per TB.
The comment about professional services is also odd in a relative context, since Netezza makes a great play of not having any!
We’d strongly encourage anyone looking at Netezza to do a bake-off against DATAllegro in a PoC. That’s the only way to assess relative performance on a given application. Looking at old, anonymous blog posts definitely isn’t the best way to make a comparison 🙂
Fortunately, more and more prospects are doing head-to-head PoCs. This makes sense, given that NZ and DATAllegro are the only appliance vendors other than Teradata with meaningful revenues. NZ finally admitted to this in a recent briefing with the451.
Stuart
CEO, DATAllegro
First, I am a Sr. Storage Engineer for my company (company with +300K employees). We went through a bake off with many of the companies claiming to be a “database appliance”. Netezza tasted the best.
I would warn many of you that paying attention to the “speed” only is a grave mistake. We have many databases that are in the 10s of TBs range. Many of those live on a Mainframe or Propriatary server systems. The key issue though becomes whether or not you can protect the TBs of data on the system. In my searches I have seen no mention of how to protect these “appliances”. Standard methods (snapshots, clones, mirrors) of replication may not be available. How to get data to other storage devices in a timely manner to meet regulatory and best practice data protection requirements do not seem to be well documented or thought out.
Ultimately, I am saying do not just look out for performance, but look at what the complete package looks like. Don’t just believe them that they work with everything. Make them show you documentation on how to configure the complete solution so that you know they will actually be able to help you through initializing the system into your environment.
As you go out to evaluate this exciting new space, do not let the speed of queries blind you from some of the other fundimental facts such as how your going to protect that data you need to access at the speed of electrons.
Yes, I am a frustrated DB appliance owner. As it is a Sunday night and have to “make” something work that may not scale into the future.
The Nameless Storage Engineer at a big company
So are you a frustrated Netezza owner, or a frustrated owner of a Netezza competitor’s product?
Thanks for posting!
CAM