Netezza has expanded its family of analytic appliances with the launch of Skimmer data warehouse appliance, which is based on the technology that powers the Netezza TwinFin architecture integrated with the company’s database accelerator and standard blade servers.
The company claims that the new Skimmer appliance can power development groups and data marts or serve as a platform for application appliances that is easy to deploy and manage. It can power small to mid-sized data warehouses, serve as an ‘edge’ appliance in larger hub-and-spoke deployments or as a test and development system in conjunction with the TwinFin.
According to Netezza, the Skimmer appliance is built using commodity blade servers and storage, turbocharged by FPGAs that filter out extraneous data. Each appliance contains a Snippet Blade (or S-Blade), which is responsible for processing SQL queries in parallel across 8 pairs of Intel CPU cores and FPGA cores. It is packed in a 7 rack-unit chassis and offers up to 10TB of user data capacity.
In addition, it integrates with ETL, BI and analytic applications through standard ODBC, JDBC and OLE DB interfaces and is a suitable platform for building industry-specific application appliances that integrate business intelligence (BI) applications with the data warehouse.
Jim Baum, president and CEO of Netezza, said: “Today, the new Skimmer appliance brings the simplicity and performance of our technology to our partners, small organisations and departments at an affordable cost. Together, Netezza’s TwinFin and Skimmer appliances allow customers to deploy this capability to the edges of their enterprise, using Skimmer to complement their centralised TwinFin systems.”
