The IBM Netezza datawarehouse appliance

Editor's Notes

• #3: That’s exactly what the Netezza TwinFin is in the data warehousing and analytics world – a true appliance, which sets it apart from the competition It is engineered from the ground up for data warehousing and analytics And offers a complete solution that integrates database, server and storage together It supports standard interfaces such as ODBC, JDBC and ANSI SQL, making it very easy to deploy. Takes 2 days to get up and running versus weeks for other solutions The appliance characteristics translate into real value for customers (what we refer to as the 4 S’s)TwinFin is 10-100X faster than competitors like Oracle, Teradata and others. When analytic queries take seconds instead of hours to perform, customers get the opportunity to completely rethink their business processes and in some cases, even launch entirely new businesses The appliance is unlike anything that DBAs and IT teams have experienced in the past. Whereas Oracle and Teradata data warehouses require armies of specialists to manage, Netezza offers performance out-of-the-box, without requiring any tuning, indexing, aggregations, etc. A single appliance scales to more than a petabyte of user data capacity, not just acting as a repository for information, but allowing complex analytics to be conducted at-scale, on all the enterprise data By embedding analytics deep into the data warehouse, TwinFin powers high performance advanced analytics 100’s or even 1000’s of times faster than possible before Let’s look at some examples of Netezza (true) appliances in real customer environments
• #6: A Company is judged by the Company they keep. Those were just a few examples from over 500 Netezza customers Our customers span a variety of vertical industries and sizes
• #7: Predictability
• #8: XO Communications offers avariety of communications services including voice over internet protocol (VoIP), dataand internet services, network transport, broadband wireless access, and hosted andmanaged services. Its high capacity IP network and advanced transport networksupport more than 50 percent of the Fortune 500 and many of the world’s largesttelecommunications companies.
• #12: A key component of Netezza’s performance is the way in which its streaming architecture processes data. The Netezza architecture uniquely uses the FPGA as a turbocharger … a huge performance accelerator that not only allows the system to keep up with the data stream, but it actually accelerates the data stream through compression before processing it at line rates, ensuring no bottlenecks in the IO path. You can think of the way that data streaming works in the Netezza as similar to an assembly line. The Netezza assembly line has various stages in the FPGA and CPU cores. Each of these stages, along with the disk and network, operate concurrently, processing different chunks of the data stream at any given point in time. The concurrency within each data stream further increases performance relative to other architectures.Compressed data gets streamed from disk onto the assembly line at the fastest rate that the physics of the disk would allow. The data could also be cached, in which case it gets served right from memory instead of disk. The first stage in the assembly line, the Compress Engine within the FPGA core, picks up the data block and uncompresses it at wirespeed, instantly transforming each block on disk into 4-8 blocks in memory. The result is a significant speedup of the slowest componentin any data warehouse—the disk. The disk block is then passed on to the Project engine or stage, which filters out columns based on parameters specified in the SELECT clause of the SQL query being processed.The assembly line then moves the data block to the Restrict engine, which strips off rows that are not necessary to process the query, based on restrictions specified in the WHERE clause. The Visibility engine also feeds in additional parameters to the Restrict engine, to filter out rows that should not be “seen” by a query e.g. rows belonging to a transaction that is not committed yet. The Visibility engine is critical in maintaining ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability) compliance at streaming speeds in the Netezza.The processor core picks up the uncompressed, filtered data block and performs fundamental database operations such as sorts, joins and aggregations on it. It also applies complex algorithms that are embedded in the snippet code for advanced analytics processing. It finally assembles all the intermediate results together from the entire data stream and produces a result for the snippet. The result is then sent over the network fabric to other S-Blades or the host, as directed by the snippet code.
• #14: That’s exactly what the Netezza TwinFin is in the data warehousing and analytics world – a true appliance, which sets it apart from the competition It is engineered from the ground up for data warehousing and analytics And offers a complete solution that integrates database, server and storage together It supports standard interfaces such as ODBC, JDBC and ANSI SQL, making it very easy to deploy. Takes 2 days to get up and running versus weeks for other solutions The appliance characteristics translate into real value for customers (what we refer to as the 4 S’s)TwinFin is 10-100X faster than competitors like Oracle, Teradata and others. When analytic queries take seconds instead of hours to perform, customers get the opportunity to completely rethink their business processes and in some cases, even launch entirely new businesses The appliance is unlike anything that DBAs and IT teams have experienced in the past. Whereas Oracle and Teradata data warehouses require armies of specialists to manage, Netezza offers performance out-of-the-box, without requiring any tuning, indexing, aggregations, etc. A single appliance scales to more than a petabyte of user data capacity, not just acting as a repository for information, but allowing complex analytics to be conducted at-scale, on all the enterprise data By embedding analytics deep into the data warehouse, TwinFin powers high performance advanced analytics 100’s or even 1000’s of times faster than possible before Let’s look at some examples of Netezza (true) appliances in real customer environments