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Building a data warehouse usually means buying and assembling general-purpose servers, storage systems, and database software. Startup Netezza Corp. says it will debut a line of data-warehouse appliances this week that can tackle terabyte-scale business-intelligence applications 10 to 20 times faster than conventional systems at half the cost.

Database marketing services company Epsilon Data Management Inc. is testing Netezza Performance Server. "It offers us a lower-cost alternative. And the queries do fly," says Mike Coakley, Epsilon's marketing technology products VP.

The product combines massively parallel storage systems with Hewlett-Packard ProLiant servers, linked by Gigabit Ethernet connections and custom microprocessors that preprocess data before sending it to the rack-mounted ProLiant CPUs. The system has data-storage capacity up to 18 terabytes and runs on Red Hat Linux and a PostgreSQL open-source database. It's available now for $622,000 to $2.5 million.