A number of Teradata customers have moved some or all of their data and analytic applications to IBM Netezza data warehouse appliances. The reasons these customers give for their move invariably include:

·       Time to value

·       Agility and the ability to grow with new workloads

·       Reducing their cost of ongoing maintenance

·       Improving query performance – particularly for complex analytics and ad-hoc environments as data volumes grow.

Over my next few posts I will dig deeper into these reasons and show the value of the IBM Netezza appliance.

One of Teradata’s reference customers, Overstock.com, was growing rapidly, and their warehouse was growing at over 60% per year.  Because they are an e-commerce company, they wanted to monitor and measure the effectiveness of their email campaigns. In order to keep up with these analytic requirements they needed to build a new analytic system to satisfy their current and future needs. In Overstock.com’s own words, “time-to-market”, or time to value, was of upmost importance. Overstock.com chose Teradata because they promised a 5-6 month delivery using a phased implementation project.[1]

In my opinion, Teradata took way too long to deliver a production ready system to Overstock.com. In fact many Netezza customers openly talk about how fast they have been up and running production workloads on their Netezza systems. Con-way Freight is a great example. IBM Netezza's initial set-up took less than 48 hours, and within the next two days, their entire data set was loaded onto the Netezza appliance and users had full access to the system. Four days after signing the purchase order with a Proof of Concept system in place, the new BI project was made available to internal users at Con-way Freight. And three weeks from the purchase date, the IBM Netezza-powered platform was running in full-scale production.[2]  

Now, in my opinion, that is time to value. 

Some of you might be asking, “how can Netezza do this?” Well, it all comes down to the simplicity of the Netezza system. Rather than spending days or weeks trying to decide between 19 different types of indexes like in Teradata, Netezza customers simple create the table and load it – that’s it. Netezza does not need join indexes, primary indexes, or partitioned primary indexes to perform well the way Teradata does. [3]

And with Netezza, you will not have to worry about growth and performance. The Netezza appliance scales linearly as you add data and additional racks to your system, without the need for adding more DBA resources, or doing more tuning of the database. In fact Christine Tilford from T-Mobile talks about growing from 100TB to 500TB to 1PB to 2PB, all with the same team (with only one DBA/engineer) in this video. This video also talks about true time to value, where Christine explains how T-Mobile was able to help the US Coast Guard locate a family whose boat had capsized using the power of the Netezza appliance.

If you want the fastest time to value, choose the proven leader, IBM’s Netezza 1000 appliance.

For More Information:

• White Paper: Break the "Add More Nodes" Cycle
• Video: Node Rage Support Group for Teradata Users: Session 1

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[1] Teradata Customer Story - Overstock.com retrieved 05/17/2011 from http://tinyurl.com/6mdktgm:  Since removed from the site

[2] Con-way Freight Case Study, retrieved from http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=con-way netezza&source=web&cd=5&ved=0CD4QFjAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.netezza.com%2Fdocuments%2Fcon-way-freight-case-study.pdf&ei=Xwy4ToTMDaOo2wWKjL3MDQ&usg=AFQjCNEgDL1PIvwHanu8uGh1Um8NTD6O4Q&cad=rja – Jan 31, 2012

[3] Session 2062, Partners, The Teradata User Group October 24-28, 2010 San Diego - Engineering Techniques to Achieve a Performant PDM – By Mark Miller and Danny Maddox, Teradata