With its ground-breaking data warehouse appliance, Netezza created a brand new market in 2002 and shook the data warehousing industry to its core. Designed specifically for high-performance terascale business intelligence analytics, Netezza data warehouse appliances overcame the performance limitations and astronomical costs of traditional data warehouse systems.

Architecturally integrating relational database, server and storage into the compact and power-efficient Netezza Performance Server® (NPS®) system, the NPS system delivers 10-100x the performance of traditional systems. The system's performance advantage comes from its patented streaming technology, which puts processing power right at the source, next to the data, so it can be processed "on stream" — at streaming speeds with minimal data movement. This innovation — "bringing processing power to the data" — has given organizations orders of magnitude improvements in their processing, helping them make decisions using all their data, all the time. With over 170 customers worldwide across a broad range of data-intensive industries, Netezza has a proven track record of customer success and innovation.

What is a streaming analytic™ appliance?

Now, with its streaming analytic appliance, Netezza brings appliance simplicity to a wider set of analytic challenges, including those outside traditional database processing, giving data-intensive organizations the ability to leverage business analytics across the extended enterprise.

Netezza has extended the capabilities of its NPS system beyond standard SQL-based processing by now "bringing analytics to the data": embedding complex non-SQL algorithms used by analytics applications within the appliance so they can be run on stream. Until now, many types of analytic processing were impossible within a database, including predictive model scoring, geospatial analyses and fuzzy text search analytics. These complex analytic problems, which could not be expressed in SQL, had to be solved outside the data warehouse, requiring large, time-consuming data extractions from the data warehouse. This approach works directly against the principal of minimizing data movement, and organizations pay the price: in the cost and complexity of a separate analytics server as well as analyses based on stale or incomplete data.

Netezza's streaming analytic appliance approach opens the door to a new generation of advanced analytics, including ones that were previously impractical, unaffordable or simply impossible.

What differentiates the Netezza appliance?

Netezza combines two key innovations: appliance packaging and patented streaming technology. These two elements work hand in hand to deliver Netezza's market-leading performance, low total cost of ownership and unbeatable simplicity. The industry-leading performance of the Netezza system is built on its streaming technology and enabled through innovations in the architecture, software and hardware of the system:

• The NPS system's Asymmetric Massively Parallel Processing™ (AMPP™) architecture combines the management simplicity of SMP with the raw performance and scalability of MPP.
• The system's software dynamically generates optimized code that is specific to each step of every query, keeping the query processing at physics speed by generating code in real-time, as needed.
• The system hardware combines enterprise-quality commodity disk drives with CPU and FPGA (field-programmable gate array) technology so data is processed in the most efficient manner possible, as it streams off the disk.
• The FPGA-Accelerated Streaming Technology (FAST) Engines™ framework, which leverages the FPGA to provide performance acceleration advantages and functionality as rapidly as data can be read from the disk drive on each intelligent node.

This innovative architecture also provides an open environment and powerful enabling platform for advanced algorithmic development, creating new opportunities for analyzing information beyond what can be done currently. By moving analytic functions inside the appliance, Netezza's massively parallel streaming processing operates on data where it resides, with unprecedented efficiency and dramatic performance improvement. To catalyze the development of these advanced applications, Netezza launched the Netezza Developer Network to bring together innovative customers, partners, service providers, educational institutions and government agencies to leverage the Netezza analytic platform for advanced application and algorithm development.

How are customers using Netezza appliances?

Beyond traditional reporting on historical data, companies are deploying Netezza appliances to help them monitor current behaviors and predict future patterns in real time. More users across the extended enterprise, from power users to casual users to those at the edge of the enterprise, are now able to make all their data actionable — quickly, simply and affordably. Market-leading companies across a range of industries, including telecommunications, retail, financial services, healthcare and outsourced analytic services, are using the NPS system to leverage their information and transform the way they do business.

Click here for our brochure on the Netezza Performance Server family of streaming analytic appliances.