This is the 3rd and final example of a vendor admitting, without admitting, to an architectural limitation. The first two parts on Exadata and Teradata are here and here.
Teradata started to get real traction in the EDW space with a shared-nothing architecture in the late 1980’s. At that time the only real competition was DB2 on an IBM mainframe. From those days until just a couple of years ago IBM insisted that for MVS, then z/OS, customers should stick to the mainframe for their data warehouses and marts. There was some dabbling with sharded data in DB2 for z/OS… and Teradata made some in-roads… as did Netezza… but IBM insisted that there was no reason not to stay Blue. DB2 on AIX and then LINUX appeared… and both offered a better price/performance option than DB2 ob Z/OS… but the faithful stayed faithful for the most part.
Then IBM bought Netezza, a pure shared-nothing microprocessor-based machine, and the recommendation changed. Today IBM recommends the Analytics Accelerator, based on Netezza, to mainframe users who want to deploy an EDW. This is an admission, with no admission at all, that there was all along an architectural advantage to shared-nothingness.
If you search this blog for “Netezza” you can get my perspective on that technology. But to be blunt, the Analytics Accelerator is not IBM’s best EDW platform… DB2 LUW is by far… and with BLU LUW is better still.
I have made it clear in my previous posts that I consider it lazy for an IT shop to commit to a vendor or to a product. As engineers we need to embrace change. For IBM z/OS shops this means a realistic look at non-z/OS alternatives to deploy or to re-deploy an EDW. It makes no sense to build a data warehouse or a data mart directly on z/OS. Use the Analytics Accelerator or, better still, open the competition to better products like DB2 LUW, Teradata, Vertica, etc.
References
Database Fog Blog
- Netezza Zone Maps and I/O Avoidance
- DB2 BLU vs. Netezza… and the Winner is…
- Wondering About Netezza… and A Teradata Prediction Comes True…
- MPP on HANA, Exadata, Teradata, and Netezza
- My 2 Cents: Netezza 1Q2013
- Will Hadoop Eat Greenplum and Netezza?
- Netezza Workload Management
- Co-processors and database machines: Intel, Netezza, and Teradata
Other