Netezza

{{Short description|Provider of Integrated Data Warehouse Hardware and Software}}

{{Infobox company

|name = Netezza

|logo = Netezza_company_logo.png

|type = Subsidiary of IBM

|foundation = 1999

|location = Marlborough, Massachusetts, United States

|key_people =

|num_employees = 469 (2010){{Cite web|url=https://www.zdnet.com/article/netezzas-twinfin-fuels-profit-surge/|title=Netezza's TwinFin fuels profit surge|first=Larry|last=Dignan|website=ZDNet|date=27 Aug 2010|accessdate=10 Aug 2023}}

|products = Data Warehouse Appliance
Integrated Data Warehouse Hardware and Software
Professional Services
Customer Services

|parent = IBM

|industry = Data warehousing

|revenue = {{increase}} US$190.6 million (FY 2010)

|homepage = {{URL |www.netezza.com}}

}}

{{commons category}}

File:Netezza.jpeg

IBM Netezza (pronounced ne-teez-a) is a subsidiary of American technology company IBM that designs and markets high-performance data warehouse appliances and advanced analytics applications for the most demanding analytic uses including enterprise data warehousing, business intelligence, predictive analytics and business continuity planning.

Netezza was acquired by IBM on September 20, 2010.{{cite web|url=https://www.reuters.com/article/us-netezza-ibm-idUSTRE68J26220100920|publisher=Reuters|accessdate=10 Aug 2023|title=IBM to buy analytics company Netezza for $1.7 billion|date=21 September 2010}} IBM released 4 generations of Netezza Appliances (Twinfin, Striper, Mako) where it was later reintroduced in June 2019 as a fourth generation NPS, Netezza Performance Server, part of the IBM CloudPak for Data offering (Hammerhead).{{Cite web|title=What happened to Netezza?|url=https://www.ibm.com/blogs/journey-to-ai/2020/05/what-happened-to-netezza/

|date=2020-05-28|website=www.ibm.com|language=en-US|access-date=2020-10-09}}{{Cite web |date=2022-04-29 |title=Netezza Database {{!}} How does Netezza Database work with Examples? |url=https://www.educba.com/netezza-database/ |access-date=2023-08-17 |website=EDUCBA |language=en-US}}

History

Netezza was founded in 1999 by Foster Hinshaw.{{Cite web |date=2018-10-12 |title=The Colossal Spider Web of Netezza Alumni |url=https://venturefizz.com/stories/boston/colossal-spider-web-netezza-alumni |access-date=2024-09-05 |website=VentureFizz |language=en}} In 2000 Jit Saxena joined Hinshaw as co-founder. The company was incorporated in Delaware on December 30, 1999 as Intelligent Data Engines, Inc. and changed its name to Netezza Corporation in November 2000. Netezza announced the industry's first "data warehouse appliance" in 2003{{Cite web |title= Netezza Performance Server (NPS™) 8000 Series |work= Product web page |publisher= Netezza |url= http://www.netezza.com/products/index.html |url-status=dead |archiveurl= https://web.archive.org/web/20040203155216/http://www.netezza.com/products/index.html |archivedate=February 3, 2004 |accessdate= August 16, 2013 }} to meet the industry's need to make use of the rapidly increasing ability to collect consumer data. In July 2007, Netezza Corporation had its initial public offering under the ticker “NZ” on NYSE Arca.{{Cite web|url=https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1132484/000095013507001814/b64586s1sv1.htm|title=sv1|website=www.sec.gov}}{{Cite web|url=https://www.theregister.com/2007/07/21/netezza_ipo_up/|title=Netezza nets plenty of cash in IPO|first=Ashlee|last=Vance|author-link=Ashlee Vance|website=www.theregister.com|date=21 July 2007|accessdate=10 August 2023}}

Hinshaw coined the term "data warehouse appliance" to describe a product of shared nothing parallel nodes specifically targeted for high data volumes for modern data analytics.{{Cite news |url= http://www.infostor.com/index/articles/display/293088/articles/infostor/top-news/introducing-data-warehouse-appliances.html |work= Infostor |title= Introducing 'data warehouse appliances' |author= Steve Norall |date= May 18, 2007 |access-date= April 3, 2017 }}{{cite web |url=http://tdwi.org/articles/2007/05/23/still-another-data-warehouse-appliance-is-coming.aspx|title=Still Another Data Warehouse Appliance Is Coming!|website=www.tdwi.org|date=23 May 2007|accessdate=10 August 2023}}

He left Netezza to found Dataupia in 2005.{{Cite news |title= Foster Hinshaw Back in Command at Dataupia; News of Company's Death Greatly Exaggerated, He Says |author= Wade Roush |date= November 17, 2009 |work= XConomy |url= http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2009/11/17/foster-hinshaw-back-in-command-at-dataupia-news-of-companys-death-greatly-exaggerated-he-says/ |access-date= April 3, 2017 }}

Netezza software was based on PostgreSQL 7.2.{{Cite web|url=https://www.slideshare.net/pgconf/elephant-roads-a-tour-of-postgres-forks|title=Elephant Roads: a tour of Postgres forks|date=October 6, 2010}}

Jim Baum was appointed CEO of Netezza in January 2008{{Cite web |last=Brown |first=Rodney H. |date=30 September 2011 |title=Baum out as CEO of Netezza |url=https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/mass-high-tech/2011/09/baum-out-as-ceo-of-netezza.html |access-date=2024-09-05 |website=Boston Business Journal}} after co-founder Jit Saxena announced his retirement. Baum started at Netezza as chief operating officer in 2006.{{cite web |url=http://www.masshightech.com/stories/2010/08/30/daily8-Netezza-CEO-Baum-guides-data-storage-firm-through-downturn.html|title =Netezza CEO Baum guides data storage firm through downturn|publisher =Mass High Tech|date=30 August 2010}}{{cite press release |url=http://www.netezza.com/releases/2006/release080106.htm |title=NETEZZA NAMES JIM BAUM PRESIDENT AND COO |date=August 1, 2006 |publisher=Netezza}}

IBM and Netezza on September 20, 2010 announced they entered into a definitive agreement for IBM to acquire Netezza in a cash transaction at a price of $27 per share or at a net price of approximately $1.7 billion, after adjusting for cash.

IBM released 4 generations of Netezza Appliances (Twinfin N1001 (in 2010), Striper N2001, Mako N3001 (in 2015)), where it was later introduced in June 2019 as a fourth generation NPS system, part of the IBM CloudPak for Data System offering (Hammerhead).

IBM also released Netezza as a service (SaaS) fully managed and hosted offering, in 2020, on both Microsoft Azure as well as on AWS, fully backward compatible with the on-premise appliance form factor.

In August 2023, IBM Netezza picked up a table format from Apache Iceberg which would extend the reach of Netezza capabilities into a data lake house.{{Cite web |last=Clark |first=Lindsay |title=AWS and IBM Netezza back Iceberg in table format smackdown |url=https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/01/aws_and_ibm_netezza_come/ |access-date=2023-10-11 |website=www.theregister.com |language=en}} Furthermore it's integration with IBM watsonx.data (released in 2023) allows it to become a unique, hybrid compute engine based data lake house solution, the next generation data store, extending it's strategic importance even further.

Products

TwinFin, Netezza’s primary product, is designed for rapid analysis of data volumes scaling into petabytes. The company introduced the fourth generation of the TwinFin product in August 2009. Netezza introduced a scaled-down version of this appliance under the Skimmer brand in January 2010.{{Cite web|url=https://www.computerworld.com/article/2522775/netezza-launches-skimmer-data-appliance--teases-two-more.html|title=Netezza launches Skimmer data appliance, teases two more|first=Eric|last=Lai|date=January 25, 2010|website=Computerworld}}

In February 2010, Netezza announced that it had opened up its systems to support major programming models, including Hadoop, MapReduce, Java, C++, and Python models. Netezza's partners predicted to leverage this analytic application support are Tibco Spotfire, MicroStrategy, Pursway, DemandTec and QuantiSense.{{Needs citation|date=October 2024}}

The company also markets specialized appliances for retail, spatial, complex analytics and regulatory compliance needs. Netezza sells software-based products for migrating from Oracle Exadata and for implementing data virtualization and federation (data abstraction) schemes.{{Needs citation|date=October 2024}}

The Netezza appliance was the foundation of IBM Db2 Analytics Accelerator (IDAA).{{cite web|url=http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/db2/zos/analytics-accelerator/ |title=IBM - DB2 High Performance Query Accelerator - DB2 Analytics Accelerator for z/OS - Software |publisher=01.ibm.com |date= |accessdate=2013-07-19}}

In 2012 the products were re-branded as IBM PureData for Analytics.{{Cite news |title= IBM takes on Oracle with PureData appliances: 'Watch out, Larry, here we come' |work= The Register |date= October 10, 2012 |author= Timothy Prickett Morgan |url= https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/10/ibm_puredata_database_appliances/?page=2 |access-date= April 3, 2017 }}

In 2017, IBM released next to Netezza, the Integrated Analytics System {{Cite web|url=https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/ias?topic=system-overview|title=IAS - Overview|website=www.ibm.com}} using Power-8 processing frame and Db2 as the database engine in an offering called Db2 Warehouse. It featured both row-based and columnar storage plus high-speed flash drives. The Db2 Warehouse engine runs both on the cloud or on-prem.{{Needs citation|date=October 2024}}

In 2019, after acquiring Red Hat, IBM established Cloud Pak offerings based on OpenShift, and revived Netezza as Netezza Performance Server under Cloud Pak for Data, both of which could run on-prem or on the cloud. The offering is a 64-bit NPS with flash drives and optimized FPGAs. The modernized NPS is 100 percent identical in feature compatibility to Netezza Mako, and moving to this platform required only, either nzmigrate to clone the environment or an nzmigrate or nzbackup/restore.{{Cite web|url=https://www.ibm.com/products/netezza|title=Netezza Performance Server - Overview|website=www.ibm.com|date=9 April 2024 }}

In 2020, the first Netezza Performance Server in the cloud was GA on Amazon Web Services. This offering uses the actual AMPP Netezza Hardware, not commodity hardware running Netezza software. Migrating to this platform also requires only an nzmigrate or nzbackup/restore through an S3 bucket. It is a direct competitor to Amazon's Red Shift database. It is also available in Azure and IBM Cloud.

Technology

Netezza’s proprietary AMPP (Asymmetric Massively Parallel Processing) architecture is a two-tiered system designed to quickly handle very large queries from multiple users.{{Needs citation|date=October 2024}}

The first tier is a high-performance Linux SMP host that compiles data query tasks received from business intelligence applications, and generates query execution plans. It then divides a query into a sequence of sub-tasks, or snippets that can be executed in parallel, and distributes the snippets to the second tier for execution.{{Needs citation|date=October 2024}}

The second tier consists of one to hundreds of snippet processing blades, or S-Blades, where all the primary processing work of the appliance is executed. The S-Blades are intelligent processing nodes that make up the massively parallel processing (MPP) engine of the appliance. Each S-Blade is an independent server that contains multi-core Intel-based CPUs and Netezza’s proprietary multi-engine, high-throughput FPGAs. The S-Blade is composed of a standard blade-server combined with a special Netezza Database Accelerator card that snaps alongside the blade. Each S-Blade is, in turn, connected to multiple disk drives processing multiple data streams in parallel in TwinFin or Skimmer.{{Needs citation|date=October 2024}}

AMPP employs industry-standard interfaces (SQL, ODBC, JDBC, OLE DB) and provides load times in excess of 2 TB/hour and backup/restore data rates of more than 4 TB/hour.{{Needs citation|date=October 2024}}

In 2009, the company transitioned from PowerPC processors to Intel CPUs.{{Cite web |title=Software and Services recent news {{!}} InformationWeek |url=https://www.informationweek.com/software-services |access-date=2024-10-02 |website=Information Week |language=en}} In August, 2009, with the introduction of the 4th generation TwinFin product, Netezza moved from proprietary blades to IBM blades.{{Needs citation|date=October 2024}}

Recognition and criticism

Netezza was added to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for DBMS in January, 2009.{{Cite web |date=12 January 2009 |title=Gartner's 2008 data warehouse database management system Magic Quadrant is out | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services |url=http://www.dbms2.com/2009/01/12/gartners-2008-data-warehouse-database-management-system-magic-quadrant-is-out/ |website=DMS2}}

References

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