Designed specifically for high-performance and terascale analytics, the Netezza Performance Server family of streaming analytic appliances architecturally integrates a relational database, server and storage into a single, compact and power-efficient unit. Netezza has placed processing power next to the data, so analysis occurs at the source at streaming speeds, delivering 10 to 100 times the performance of traditional systems at less cost. Analyses that took days now take just seconds, the vendor says, increasing productivity, competitiveness and meaning a faster time to value for many business initiatives. Judges agreed, noting that the product fits into an industry-wide trend toward systems that enable next-generation business intelligence -- an attractive concept that can be challenging to implement.

Release 4 of the Netezza appliance also means that enterprises can broaden the types and complexity of workloads and handle larger numbers of concurrent queries and users. This was recently noted as critically important by analyst Mark Beyer, co-author of Gartner's 2007 data warehouse DBMS Magic Quadrant. Netezza says its "secret sauce" is its patented Intelligent Query Streaming design that enables the NPS system to process only the relevant data for queries, causing extremely efficient data movement at physics speed through the system. The vendor says its significant performance increase in Release 4 is due to several algorithmic optimizations across the NPS system. Release 4 enhancements enable the system to make smarter decisions about the data required for a specific query, and limit movement of data irrelevant to the query, right at the source. It certainly seemed to impress our judges.

In North America, the vendor says a customer can get started with a Netezza system for less than $200,000. Learn more about the Netezza Performance Server (NPS) Analytic Appliance Release 4 here on Netezza's Web site.

Editors, SearchDataManagement.com