Netezza aims to speed apps processing

FRAMINGHAM, MASS. - Start-up Netezza, which gets its name from an Urdu word meaning "results," says its new multifunction appliance can get customers results 10 to 20 times faster than when they use a combination of separate server, storage and database systems.

The company's first product, the Netezza Performance Server 8000 Series machine, is designed to speed the handling of queries to enterprise resource planning and other I/O-intensive applications that customers can run on it.

"For business intelligence applications, such as data warehousing, companies normally run expensive Oracle databases on expensive Sun servers attached to expensive EMC gear," says Steve Duplessie, senior analyst for Enterprise Storage Group. "If you have a 25-terabyte system, the average query can take hours to run - this mocks the whole business intelligence concept of current, readily accessible, highly usable data. Netezza can take 90% of the query time out of the equation, for half the money."

The system starts at $622,000, whereas multiterabyte systems based on an EMC Symmetrix, Sun Fire 12K server and Oracle 9i database can cost more than $1 million.

The Netezza server is powered by Intel Pentium III Xeon processors and relies on a database that is built on open source PostgreSQL.

It also includes specialized silicon processors that attach CPUs to disk drives and stream data off the disk faster than in traditional systems.

"We looked at some of Netezza's early performance numbers and didn't believe what we saw because they were such an order of magnitude faster than what we were able to produce on traditional platforms," says Bryan Kennedy, COO for Epsilon, a marketing services provider in Burlington, Mass., which is used to hosting multiterabyte database systems on products from companies such as Sun and Oracle.

"But we saw 300% to 1,000% performance improvements on average using Netezza's server," he adds.

Netezza, which was founded in 2000, has collected more than $28 million in venture funding from companies such as Battery Ventures, Matrix Partners and Charles River Ventures.

Netezza: www.netezza.com