Netezza co-founder's new company takes different data warehouse appliance route

Appliances that bundle hardware and software a growing trend in data management

By Jon Brodkin, Network World
May 17, 2007 01:49 PM ET

A co-founder of data warehouse appliance company Netezza Monday unveiled a data warehouse appliance from his new company that customers can run on Oracle, IBM and Microsoft databases without having to modify existing applications.

Foster Hinshaw’s new company is Dataupia, whose Satori Server 12000 appliance is designed to provide the speed of a massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture with a relatively simple implementation.

Often, when customers buy a new data warehouse appliance, they have to rewrite the code underlying applications, such as CRM and ERP, that use a database, says James Kobielus, principal analyst for data management at Current Analysis.

“Dataupia’s key differentiator is the ability to run the leading enterprise databases natively within [its appliance], which allows users to run existing database applications without needing to modify them,” Kobielus says. “This is a feature that Dataupia seems to be ahead of the market on. We don’t see it in other data warehouse appliances.”

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The Satori Server 12000 supports applications that run on Oracle, IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server databases. The product costs $20,000 per “blade,” each of which holds 2TB of data.

This price is “pretty cheap” and puts Dataupia at the low end of the market, along with vendors like DATAllegro and Netezza, Kobielus says.

Data warehouse appliances, which bundle CPU, storage and software in one package, are growing in popularity. “If you looked at IBM a couple months ago, they re-architected their entire data warehousing product line around appliances,” Kobielus says. “The data warehousing appliance has become everyone's go-to-market strategy.”

Hinshaw, who left Netezza two years ago to found Dataupia and become its CEO, says he is now targeting mainstream data-warehousing market needs, such as business intelligence and long-term storage, whereas Netezza’s product appeals to companies that need high-performance analytics. Like Netezza, though, Hinshaw’s new company uses an MPP architecture that he says dramatically reduces the amount of data movement, increasing scalability and performance.

“That’s the part that excites me, the mainstream data-warehouse guys can get the scalability they’ve wanted for so long,” he says.

Hinshaw coined the term data warehouse appliance, according to this publication.

Dataupia’s appliance is best suited for small-to-midsize businesses that do not need appliances to handle multiple data sets, according to Kobielus. “An appliance such as Dataupia is really for more limited data warehouses that manage only one type of master data, be it customer or product data, maybe for just one business unit,” he says.

Hinshaw’s presence gives the vendor strong credibility, but Dataupia may find it difficult to compete against the other vendors that provide low-cost data warehousing products, he says. “Dataupia is challenging other, better-established start-ups – most notably, Netezza, DATAllegro, and Greenplum – for the dubious distinction of being lowest-cost (hence, lowest-margin) provider of DW appliances,” Kobielus writes in an e-mail.