Phil Francisco

Okay I'll admit that my first posting about the new Oracle Data Warehouse Appliance (DWA) tonight was a tad on the "snarky" side. But I have to say that I think it was because of all influences in the environment all around me. Straight away since the announcement yesterday afternoon, there's been a healthy degree of skepticism from industry insiders.

 

Beyond his commentary on Larry Ellison's hairstyle, Gavin Clarke of the UK's Channel Register virtually flogged Larry for flogging the "Oracle server appliance alliance with HP". Some of the best snippets included:

 

  • Gavin's subtitle: "(Not) a hardware provider"

  • "And so to chief executive Larry Ellison, who Wednesday afternoon announced Oracle's third effort in 10 years bundling his company's software with someone else's hardware. This time, it's a high-performance, Oracle data and storage server stack locking arms with old favorite Hewlett-Packard."

 

And after taking several informative paragraphs to expound on Oracle's two previously-failed attempts at ‘appliantization' - most recently the "Network Computer" initiative circa-2000 - to draw the clear analogy to yesterday's announcement, Clarke closed out his piece with this stinger:

 

  • "In a telling sign of how much faith Ellison places in his latest appliance, he did not sit down for his traditional, open-mic smack-down session with OpenWorld attendees to field questions."

 

 

 

Analyst/blogger Curt Monash summarized more than a few skeptical digs in his Oracle Exadata and Oracle data warehouse appliance sound bites posting earlier today. For example, here are a few "bites" from Curt's post:

 

 

 

VP & Global Marketing CTO Chuck Hollis of EMC weighed in with a couple good shots on his Chuck's Blog post: Oracle does hardware (emphasis mine):

  • "Of course, there's little in the way of performance comparisons to help us evaluate just how fast this beast might go, except the ‘Up To 10x Faster' which smells a bit optimistic, never mind that it's Oracle comparing with itself, rather than other data warehousing appliances."

  • "Every year at Oracle Open World, we hear about many "new initiatives" from Oracle. Well, not to be harsh here, but it's my impression that very few of them get talked about at next year's Oracle Open World. I routinely dig up past announcements from previous years, and it's relatively consistent pattern. I think it's fair to ask the question -- just how serious is Oracle about all of this?"

 

 

 

 

But the lead cynic was none other than Oracle CEO Larry Ellison himself. After years of denying performance issues at scale with various generations of Oracle DBMS software for data warehousing, Larry dropped this 11g-megaton bombshell about Oracle's data warehouse scalability, pre-Exadata - laying out the fundamental reason why Netezza has become the industry leader in Data Warehouse Appliances (source: ZDNet's Larry Dignan):

"Ellison, speaking at Oracle's OpenWorld conference, said large databases are creating a fundamental problem: Disk storage systems can't cope with data that has to be moved off of drives to database servers. He called it a ‘data bandwidth problem.'

"As data gets larger the slowdowns become more unbearable. At one terabyte you will notice data bandwidth slippage. At 10 terabytes, storage systems crawl. ‘At one terabyte the problem rears its ugly head and it gets worse every year,' said Ellison."

 

 

And that's not all - the barbs, skepticism and "bites" go on in site-after-site, and commentary-after-commentary. So please forgive my snarky-ness - I blame it on the "nuture" of my environment, not my personal "nature", per se.

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Phil Francisco

It was an odd email exchange. Only 30-minutes earlier, at approximately 3:04pm US-PDT, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, head of one of the most powerful database technology companies on Earth, had publicly launched Oracle's entrée into the Data Warehouse Appliance marketplace: "the HP Oracle Database Machine and the Oracle Exadata Data Storage Server" - while simultaneously "sporting a curiously Romanesque hair style".

 

 

Larry Ellison & Julius Caesar - separated at birth? (Wikipedia: Julius Caesar)

 

 

Perhaps we should have been cowered by such a goliathan announcement? Perhaps we should have quivered? Well that's when the email showed up. You see, Netezza had a booth (or "stand" - as I'm writing this from London tonight) in the exposition area of Oracle's big OpenWorld show in San Francisco. Within minutes of Larry's presentation, in which Netezza figured prominently albeit with substantially erroneous information across Mr. Ellison's charts, the Netezza stand was completely deluged with people saying things like, "I had never talked to your company about data warehousing before, but if Larry is going to spend 10 minutes talking about you, I need to know more." And the Netezza product brochures starting flowing - not in a trickle like a leaky pipe, but like water through a burst dam.

 

 

Larry hadn't just brought up Netezza but had spent some "quality time" extolling the strengths of the Netezza architecture - moving query processing horsepower as close as possible to the storage elements of the system, and his commentary had marked Netezza as the leader in the Data Warehouse Appliance (DWA) approach. Within the hour, our team's supply had run out. Undeterred by the lack of the product brochures - the team had moved on to distributing our glossy fold out "BI Emergency Survival Guide".

 

 

But what this anecdote from the floor of a 50,000-person trade show really meant was that a sea-change had happened in the industry. No less than Larry Ellison had put his imprimatur on the DWA industry segment and in so-doing had also summarily marked Netezza as the industry's leading vendor in the segment.

 

 

Since then, phones have rung off the hook and email exchanges have approached the immediacy of Instant Messaging, with in-bound requests for more information about the Netezza Performance Server®. Whatever doubt that existed in the market that DWAs were a force in the marketplace was eradicated yesterday... at approximately 3:04 pm US-PDT.

 

 

"Please send more product brochures," indeed! Thanks for all the sales leads, Larry! We'll get around to correcting all your misconceptions about our product shortly.

 

 

0 Comments Permalink Tags: oracle, exadata, nps, openworld, netezza, larry_ellison
razi

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
-- Jan van de Snepscheut, 1953-1994, computer scientist and educator, California Institute of Technology

So, yesterday I wrote about "the Netezza's" transformation into a platform for deep analytics. Now I know a platform is only as good as the applications available on it, which brings me to our announcement this morning.

 

Last September, we got together with a handful of visionary partners and customers and created the Netezza Developer Network (NDN) with the goal of developing truly innovative analytic applications. We announced the first wave of these offerings today, with 5 NDN partners delivering game-changing applications built using Netezza's OnStream analytics. Let me highlight a couple of them here.

 

 

  • Systech Solutions' profitability analysis application for retail and CPG companies provides cost and revenue analysis at the detailed SKU and customer level. It gives business users the ability to build and run profitability models using a GUI, instead of relying on IT to do it for them. This is pretty unique, because traditionally something like this would take huge amounts of time - measured in many months - not to mention the resources required. Their app cuts this down by orders of magnitude! So you not only get very fine-grained profitability analysis, but it's available very, very quickly. That makes all the difference between gut-feel decisions and data-based ones about which products and customer to keep, which prices to re-negotiate and how to truly impact the bottom line.

 

  • Imagine if telco service providers could analyze each and every one of the many millions of call detail records they collect and store, before making very important decisions - the kinds that can dramatically alter their earnings statements. That's what RateIntegration's app offers - a tool for business users that allows them to model the impact of competitors' pricing and regulatory changes to figure out the most optimal rate plans. Business analysts can also directly implement custom scoring algorithms for customer segmentation and profiling using their flexible rules engine.

 

Apart from these, we have Multi-Threaded Inc's fuzzy name and text matching app for critical anti-terrorism, money laundering and digital forensics operations; HCL Technology's implementation of Monte Carlo simulations for pricing derivatives; and Edge Associate's library of SQL functions to speed up migrations to "the Netezza". Make sure you check out the brand spanking new applications webpage to get more details about each of these members and their applications, and don't forget to stop by their booths at the User Conference.

 

 

"As long as one does not have to wait minutes to hours between computational gestures, something amazing happens; one gets problem solving at the speed of human insight"
-- Data-Centric Computing with the Netezza Architecture, Sandia National Laboratories

While the new applications developed by NDN members are unique and serve very different markets - retail, telecommunications, financial services and government - they have remarkable similarities in the value they offer to customers. The applications power complex analytics orders of magnitude faster than economically feasible before, allowing users to perform "what-if" analyses to more accurately predict future outcomes. These analyses can be performed on large volumes of detailed data, providing unique business insights that would otherwise be lost in sampled and summarized data. The deployment and management of the overall solution is greatly simplified, freeing up business users to focus on results rather than worrying about tuning and maintaining the system.

 

What's really neat about Netezza's open platform approach is the ideas and innovation it is generating and the differentiated applications it is helping launch. Now that's what platform innovation is all about, isn't it? At Netezza, it's about bringing the power of analytics to the mainstream.

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razi

"The milk of disruptive innovation doesn't flow from cash-cows "
-- David Isenberg, Blogger, Musings About Loci of Intelligence and Stupidity

Dare I say ... "orders of magnitude performance" for data warehouse applications is old news as far as Netezza customers are concerned! It became fairly obvious to me at the Netezza European User Conference, held a few months ago. In presentation after presentation, customers talked about the performance and simplicity benefits they got from "the Netezza" - how the proof-of-concept (against their favorite legacy data warehouse vendor) seemed unbelievable at first, but certainly proved true in production; the fact that they did indeed get orders of magnitude better performance; and how all this changed the way they did business. Brian Ganly of The Carphone Warehouse used this chart to highlight Netezza performance during his talk about the "Netezza Experience." I think it captures the sentiment really well ...

 

 

 

It's not that data warehouse performance is not important any more, or that somehow the 100X performance that Netezza delivers is "enough". In fact, what the Netezza customers were alluding to, in a customer's own words, is: "Netezza does what it says on the tin!" We talk about blisteringly fast performance without requiring tuning and aggregations at half the cost of other systems, and we deliver. Once customers see for themselves what "the Netezza" can do for their data warehouse, they get intrigued about the possibility of what else it could do for their business. And that quickly leads them to look beyond raw performance for data warehouses and apply "the Netezza" to new and interesting big-data analytic problems.

 

 

"... the best products become platforms at some point."
-- Bob Warfield, author of the SmoothSpan Blog

As the data warehouse market continues to evolve, more and more companies are looking to use information as a competitive lever across their organizations. The most successful will be those that make use of information to exploit arbitrage windows in the marketplace and predict future outcomes more accurately. These companies will differentiate themselves by making high performance analytics pervasive, providing employees, partners and vendors access to the kinds of analytics that are only available to a select few in the enterprise today.

 

What's needed to deliver on the promise of advanced analytics is a platform that can overcome the challenges of doing deep analytics on large data volumes - performance, complexity and cost. Let's look at how advanced analytics are done on traditional systems. In most cases, these poor data warehouses are so overtaxed that adding any more processing is a certain way to bring them to their knees. And so the usual approach is to extract huge data sets onto an outsized SMP server or compute grid, perform the analytic computation on it and load result sets back to the data warehouse for querying. You can clearly see the problems with this approach. It's expensive, especially when you're talking about a large SMP or grid; it's complex since you have more systems to maintain; but most importantly you get poor performance even if you spend tons of time and money on the infrastructure. The data movement back and forth introduces the same latency and performance bottlenecks that still plague traditional data warehouse architectures.

 

What we've done with "the Netezza" is created just such a platform that overcomes these complex analytics challenges. The idea is quite simple actually. Algorithms for analytic tasks such as scoring, text and spatial processing, image and video analysis and financial simulations can be run directly on the intelligent nodes inside the Netezza. So these algorithms can act on the data where it resides, rather than sending it off-board for processing. You not only get the benefit of fully parallelized execution across hundreds of processors resulting in orders of magnitude better performance for analytics, but also the simplicity and economy of an appliance. Plus the Netezza is able to handle all this extra processing because of the spare processing capacity built into each of its intelligent nodes. Let me refer you to Phil Francisco's blog for a blow-by-blow version of how "[OnStream analytics|p-1032]" works in practice.

 

This is all great so far - I mean any platform that provides these kinds of advantages has to be quite extraordinary! But the true value of a platform is determined by the applications that run on it and how innovative and differentiated they are. That's where there is a lot of interest and excitement in the enzee community. More on that very soon ...

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