Thinking Inside the Box

A "FUD-machine" in overdrive?

pfrancisco — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 21:31:18 GMT

A loyal customer alerted us toan Oracle blog by Jean-Pierre Dijcks earlier today that showed the Oracle FUD machine is fully revved-up and ready to go. I'd like to offer a rebuttal, however in the interest of not intruding on Jean-Pierre's entry with an overly-long comment, I've just put a short response on his blog post with a pointer to this one.

Misconceptions and Misunderstandings, or Errors and Plain-old FUD?

I’m writing to correct *just a few* of the misconceptions about what is really important in high-performance, scalable data warehouse systems, errors, or just plain-old pure “competitive FUD” points from Jean-Pierre's posting earlier today. We certainly have posted some information recently about the TwinFin product and Curt Monash’s postings late Thursday provided more info. If his readers are interested in learning more, or even signing up for a “Test Drive”, they should visit www.netezza.com.

First off, I think this is a “banner day” for Netezza. We believe that TwinFin (and the other products in the new product family) extend both our performance and price-performance advantage over our competitors. We stand by our marketing statements that we regularly demonstrate 10-100X performance advantages over our competitors, particularly competitive offerings of the major incumbent DW system vendors (“Just who are those incumbents?” Jean-Pierre's readers may ask. Well let’s just say that we see Oracle as the incumbent system and/or a challenger system in over 50% of our deal flow.).

Regarding his claims about DBM being “faster than Netezza” (and I can only assume he meant at “real” data warehouse tasks) - we’re ready whenever Oracle feels up to actually taking one of their Database Machines onsite to a customer for a fair, open customer benchmark. So far, Oracle have been, shall we say, “a little reticent” to do on-site benchmark testing against Netezza.

Next, given the large number of incorrect points in the original posting, I think perhaps that just a few of them will be useful enough for readers to get the gist of just how far afield some of the ‘facts’ are:

“It all comes down to data scan rates per rack”: Would that it were true that all of data warehousing boiled down to full-stream data scans (as if the entire world of analytics relied on “select count(*) from lineitem” types of queries), then we could all measure “goodness” on how many GB/sec of data could be burst-scanned in our systems. But that’s not the case. So we build Netezza’s data and analytic appliances to deliver the best possible overall performance at the best price and power requirements. As a consequence, and following from those same numbers as-posted, a single rack of TwinFin can process (not just scan) about 400 million rows of data per second. That’s process, as in: “scan, decompress, project, restrict, AND join, etc.”. Need more processing firepower? Netezza’s system performance scales linearly with the addition of more S-Blades: at the low-end, the TwinFin 3 can deliver as much as 100M rows/second of processing horsepower, while the TwinFin 120 can provide you with 4 billion rows/second. Does a system that still relies on using SMP-based servers running “plain old” Oracle 11g RAC scale similarly for data warehousing?

“Non-open Linux running on FPGAs”: I’m really not sure what (if anything) was meant by this, but saying that Netezza’s FPGAs “are apparently running non-open Linux” is oxymoronic on at least two different levels (FPGAs don’t typically “run” an OS and, “non-open Linux” - really?)

“User data & compresssion”: I also enjoyed the accounting of all that “user data” available to DBM users in the Oracle table and the various comments about compression. When Netezza quotes user data capacities in our systems, the numbers reflect real raw user data space, not space that will be further reduced because of required indexes in an attempt to boost performance. Furthermore, Netezza’s compression & decompression techniques allow us to extract “pure performance” from their use. By not relying on CPU cycles to decompress the data before we can process it any further, the FPGA engines decompress the data, on-the-fly, as fast as it streams off the disk drives. Can Oracle make either of those claims?

“Tolerating node failures without downtime”: In perhaps the most bald-faced inaccuracy, the Oracle blog claimed, that Netezza “continues to lack the ability to tolerate node failures without downtime”. This I can only chock up to pure competitive “FUD-ism” as our capabilities in this area have been quite strong throughout the four generations of Netezza appliances and are further strengthened in TwinFin. Netezza is a fully-redundant system with no single point of failure, even in our smallest systems. Failover in the presence of failures of the disk drives, S-Blades, internal networking or host processors (in short, everything) is automatic and done in-service, with hot-swappable replacement throughout.

“Appliance simplicity”: One thing Jean-Pierre didn’t address that might have been humorous to see his take on is the notion of “appliance simplicity” - basically the ability to build, support and maintain large to very large-sized data warehouses, with heavy workloads, with no or minimal tuning, partitioning, indexing or other “performance duct tape” required. Routinely, this capability in the Netezza systems is what delights our customers most and we have customers managing systems with several hundreds of terabytes of user data (not indexes + data, mind you - real data) with fractions of an FTE (full-time employee) devoted to them.

I hope that clears up some of the misconceptions. If any of Jean-Pierre's readers or Oracle customers would like to see or hear more about TwinFin for themselves, we definitely would invite them to come stop by our booth (#207) at TDWI or come to one or our regional Enzee Universe events coming to a location near you.

Shooting the Curl in San Diego

pfrancisco — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 14:28:03 GMT

"You stay classy, San Diego." -- Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) in "Anchorman" (2004)

This morning a few others from the Netezza Marketing and Product Management teams and I are ensconced by the Marina in sunny San Diego, CA for the TDWI World Conference and for an news announcement or two. And who better to bring us "Breaking News!" than the Number 1 newsman in all of San Diego, Ron Burgundy. [For those of you who might have been "hoping for more" from Ron in a quote about San Diego, you can check out the IMDB database for some great ones, including Ron's own historical (and hysterical) etymology for the city's name.]

Though it’s not exactly a state-secret at this point, today we’re launching the 4th generation of Netezza data warehouse and analytic appliances and the first of four initial product lines in it: TwinFin™.

Some of the core characteristics of the TwinFin and the overall platform are:

Resetting Netezza’s price-performance leadership position in the market and extending Netezza’s performance lead;
Disrupting the competitive data warehouse market among the incumbents, just as we did with our initial systems in 2003/’04;
Moving to a commercially-available, blade-based server and storage platform; and
Opening Netezza’s aperture on the broader market with a multi-product platform design to match customers’ data warehouse and analytics needs across their enterprise

After the market disruption Netezza caused with the introduction of the NPS® in 2003 and since, we have seen the entry of dozens of new startups in our wake and virtually every major incumbent data warehouse vendor has retooled its portfolio to include a “response” to the Data Warehouse Appliance (DWA) in a suddenly reenergized market. Several of them, to their credit, have advanced their value propositions and improved their competitive position.

Now it is Netezza’s time once again. With the introduction of TwinFin and the other members of the new family of products, Netezza is once again changing the game; widening the applicability of our systems to more types of customers, applications and partners in the market.

As stated in my response to Curt Monash, my response to Curt Monash last week, we think of this 4^th generation of the Netezza appliance as using “the same architecture with a new physical implementation”. Starting with TwinFin, we moved to a commodity blade-server based system framework, but one that still uses Netezza’s “secret sauce” to deliver as much as a 5X increase in performance over the previous generation of Netezza systems, namely:

· our balanced design and streaming architecture;

· the use of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology as a query processing “turbocharger”; and

· our advanced MPP management and optimization software.

And there are more innovations and performance gains on the way! TwinFin, quite simply, will serve as a platform for expanding Netezza’s performance and price-performance advantage in the industry and as the basis for advancing the state-of-the-art for in-database, analytically intensive data processing; all without sacrificing any of the appliance simplicity with which our company is synonymous.

As a couple of us said last week, Netezza has served as “the benchmark” for high-performance DWA pricing in the industry and we are now leading “the market in pivoting to a new competitive price-performance level”. With these new systems, we have embraced a trend that has been happening around the industry – the movement of marginal cost of a bit of disk storage toward $0 – with system-sizing, pricing and even system numbering focused on the performance delivered by a given platform.

We think the net effect of the new, simplified pricing structure for TwinFin and the other members of the Netezza product family will create a major disruption in the market. With starting (US-based) prices that equate to under $20,000 per terabyte, TwinFin’s list price is a fraction of other competitors’ performance-system pricing (after they’re all done playing price-obfuscation games around mirror, swap and index storage).

TwinFin and the other new Netezza data and analytic appliance products give us the opportunity to continue to lead the market and provide our customers with the best value and performance possible for all of their data warehouse and analytic processing needs. Netezza TwinFin - because two fins are faster than one.

Setting the Record Straight

pfrancisco — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 23:49:21 GMT

We came across a series of blog posts the other day which seemed to insinuate that Netezza and other competitors might be trying to shape our 10-100X performance message on the backs of comparisons to antiquated, end-of-service life systems and not comparing to current competitors' platforms . When we got to this one - "Database Customer Benchmarketing Reports" - I felt we just had to correct the record, so I wrote a response to Greg Rahn's posting to give Netezza's side of the story, namely that

we are as up-front as possible with prospective customers and use the customer benchmark testing/POC process to prove out Netezza's performance, value and simplicity value propositions;
the results of other products' performance come from our prospects/customers and not the result of Netezza running the tests on those platforms;
not only do we test against the incumbent systems, but there is almost always at least one other current competitive system that is included in the POC process;
the PowerPoint deck on which Greg was doing his analysis contained some rather ancient (in enzee-years, anyway) comparisons with versions of the NPS appliance that we have not sold in as much as 4.5 years & was really not much of a data set on which to base his analysis; and
the "proof of the pudding is in the tasting" - Netezza's success rate of converting prospects to customers through the customer benchmarking process remains very strong.

In short - we make every effort to keep the Netezza website contents both accurate and clear and we definitely feel confident in standing by our 10-100X performance claims. It would be great to have more than the Netezza "product marketing guy" clarify things - while I know some of the excellent results recent customers have seen in POC, no one knows them better than our customers & SI partners themselves.

Please Send More Product Brochures!

pfrancisco — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 03:29:40 GMT

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.