 | |
| Company type | Subsidiary ofIBM |
|---|---|
| Industry | Data warehousing |
| Founded | 1999 |
| Headquarters | Marlborough, Massachusetts,United States |
| Products | Data Warehouse Appliance Integrated Data Warehouse Hardware and Software Professional Services Customer Services |
| Revenue |  US$190.6 million(FY 2010) |
Number of employees | 469 (2010)[1] |
| Parent | IBM |
| Website | www |
IBM Netezza (pronounced ne-teez-a, a word fromUrdu language meaning "result", through Persian from Arabic natija, and a reference tonetworkappliance) is a subsidiary of American technology companyIBM that designs and markets high-performancedata warehouse appliances and advancedanalytics applications for the most demanding analytic uses including enterprisedata warehousing,business intelligence,predictive analytics andbusiness continuity planning.
Netezza was founded in 1999 by Foster Hinshaw.[2] The company was incorporated in Delaware on December 30, 1999 as Intelligent Data Engines, Inc.
In 2000 Jit Saxena joined Hinshaw as co-founder[2] and the company changed its name to Netezza Corporation in November 2000.
In 2003, Netezza announced the industry's first "data warehouseappliance"[3] to meet the industry's need to make use of the rapidly increasing ability to collect consumer data. 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.[4][5]
In 2005, Hinshaw left Netezza to foundDataupia.[6]
In 2006, Jim Baum started at Netezza as chief operating officer.[7][8]
In July 2007, Netezza Corporation had its IPO (initial public offering)) under the ticker “NZ” onNYSE Arca.[9][10]
Jim Baum was appointed CEO of Netezza in January 2008[11] after co-founder Jit Saxena announced his retirement.
On September 20, 2010 IBM and Netezza announced that 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.[12]
Between 2010 and 2015, IBM released 4 generations of Netezza Appliances (TwinFin, Skimmer, Striper, Mako) where it was later reintroduced in June 2019 as a fourth generationNPS (Netezza Performance Server), part of the IBM CloudPak for Data offering (Hammerhead).[13][14]
In 2020, IBM also released Netezza as a service (software-as-a-service orSaaS) fully managed and hosted offering on bothMicrosoft Azure and onAmazon Web Services (AWS), fully backward compatible with the on-premise appliance form factor.
In August 2023, IBM Netezza picked up a table format fromApache Iceberg which would extend the reach of Netezza capabilities into adata lakehouse.[15] Furthermore its integration withIBM watsonx.data (released in 2023) allows it to become a unique, hybrid compute-engine-based data lakehouse solution, the next generation data store, extending its strategic importance even further.
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.[1] Netezza introduced a scaled-down version of this appliance under the Skimmer brand in January 2010.[16]
In February 2010, Netezza announced that it had opened up its systems to support major programming models, includingHadoop,MapReduce,Java,C++, andPython models. Netezza's partners predicted to leverage this analytic application support areTIBCOSpotfire,MicroStrategy, Pursway, DemandTec and QuantiSense.[citation needed]
The company also markets specialized appliances for retail, spatial, complex analytics andregulatory compliance needs. Netezza sells software-based products for migrating fromOracle Exadata and for implementingdata virtualization and federation (data abstraction) schemes.[citation needed]
The Netezza appliance was the foundation ofIBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator (IDAA).[17]
In 2012, the products were re-branded asIBM PureData for Analytics.[18]
In 2017, IBM released next to Netezza, theIntegrated Analytics System[19] 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 in the cloud or on-prem.[citation needed]
In 2019, after acquiringRed Hat, IBM established CloudPak offerings based onOpenShift, and revived Netezza asNetezza Performance Server (NPS) under CloudPak for Data, both of which could run on-prem or in the cloud. The offering is a 64-bit NPS with flash drives and optimizedFPGAs. The modernized NPS is 100 percent identical in feature compatibility to Netezza Mako, and moving to this platform required only, eithernzmigrate (Netezza migrate) to clone the environment or annzbackup (Netezza backup)/restore.[20]
In 2020, the first Netezza Performance Server in the cloud was GA (generally available) on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This offering uses the actual AMPP (Asymmetric Massively Parallel Processing) Netezza Hardware, not commodity hardware running Netezza software. Migrating to this platform also requires only an nzmigrate or nzbackup/restore through anS3 bucket. It is a direct competitor to Amazon's Red Shift database. It is also available in Azure and IBM Cloud.[20]
Netezza software was based onPostgreSQL 7.2.[21]
Netezza’s proprietary AMPP (Asymmetric Massively Parallel Processing) architecture is a two-tiered system designed to quickly handle very large queries from multiple users.[citation needed]
The first tier is a high-performance LinuxSMP 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.[citation needed]
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-throughputFPGAs. 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.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
In 2009, the company transitioned from PowerPC processors to Intel CPUs.[22] In August, 2009, with the introduction of the 4th generation TwinFin product, Netezza moved from proprietary blades to IBM blades.[citation needed]
