Netezza Promises Petabyte-Scale Data Warehouse AppliancesNetezza Promises Petabyte-Scale Data Warehouse Appliances

Data Warehouse appliance vendor Netezza announced yesterday that it will join the petabyte club later this year when it launches upgrades of its Netezza Performance Server (NSP) data warehouse appliance. Demand for larger capacities is particularly strong in high-data-growth industries including telecommunications, financial services, online businesses and the federal government, according to the company.

The NPS line currently tops out at 100 terabytes of usable data in an eight-rack system, but that capacity will double in May with the release of Netezza's "Compress Engine," an add-on to the NPS now being beta tested by customers including the New York Stock Exchange.

"Compression technologies often hinder performance, but our Compress Engine not only supports higher densities, it doubles our performance," claims Ellen Rubin, vice president of marketing.

The move up to one-petabyte NPS configurations will come in the second half with upgrades that will combine "the Compress Engine, adding racks and changes in hardware for higher-density storage," notes Rubin, though she says the company has yet to announce the exact configurations. A petabyte is one thousand terabytes, which is equivalent to approximately 250 million pages of text.

Several Netezza competitors already scale to one petabyte and beyond. Teradata, for example, supports capacities up to 4.2 petabytes while DATAllegro currently lists capacities up to one petabyte.