Data warehouse appliance maker Netezza could expand beyond direct sales into the channel with an entry-level system the company has under development.
Hints of a move into the channel followed Netezza's unveiling of TwinFin, the fourth generation of the company's data warehouse and analytic appliance and the first based on IBM's blade servers.
Netezza's products compete with data warehouse appliances from Teradata, DATAllegro (now owned by Microsoft) and other vendors. Data warehouse appliances are designed to be relatively inexpensive and easy to implement compared with traditional data warehouse systems that require months, even years, of custom development work and cost millions of dollars.
Until now Netezza has based its appliances on its own hardware platform even though its real value has been in its software and its FPGA (field programmable gate array) microprocessors that speed up how the appliance processes and analyzes large volumes of data.
The new TwinFin (named for high-performance surfboards with dual fins) is based on the IBM Blade Center system but incorporates Netezza's FPGAs and software, including its database and data control and optimizer applications. TwinFin also includes IBM's data storage array systems.
TwinFin scales from handling a few hundred Gigabytes of data to a Petabyte, said Phil Francisco, vice president of product management and product marketing. The company said the system is priced at less than $20,000 per Terabyte.
TwinFin is the first of what will eventually be a four-system family, according to Francisco, including an entry-level system that he said could be sold through the channel. Netezza, while using resellers in Europe and Asia, largely sells direct in North America. Netezza is also developing a high-capacity data warehouse appliance for customers that need to archive large volumes of data and an "operationally intensive" system that can analyze high volumes of data in near-realtime.
Netezza will offer more details about the three systems under development next month, with the products themselves becoming available over the next few quarters, according to Francisco.
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