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Thinking Inside the Box

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Performance Multipliers for Data Stream Processing

 


“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.”  – Henry David Thoreau, (1817-1862) from Walden (1854)

 

 

We’re taking a little time to discuss an important facet of the NPS® system architecture – the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), which is a critical performance multiplier in the context of the NPS appliance.  Last time out I spent some time discussing what an FPGA is and what its general role is in stream-based processing.

 

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  • “So, What Is an FPGA?” – aimed at providing a most-basic introductory primer of the technology, its capabilities and its promise ( November\).

  • “FPGAs in the Mainstream & Some of Their Practical Uses” – a look at the use of FPGA technology across a broad swathe of market applications.

  • “OK – How Does Netezza Get a Performance Edge from FPGAs & What Does the Future Hold?” – linking FPGA capabilities to the benefits it brings to the NPS system and possible future directions it could enable.+{color}{size}

+This is the second in a three-part series on FPGAs, spanning the following topics:

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Today, I’d like to look at other mainstream applications of the FPGA and its growing role in the market.

Recent News About FPGA Adoption

The applications space for FPGA technology is expanding rapidly.  Nearly concurrently with my last posting, William Fellows of The 451 Group (subscription required) published an article discussing a segment of the FPGA applications market very different from data warehousing that virtually makes the case for this series postings.  Here are a few snippets of Mr. Fellows’ 28th November article (emphasis mine):

|snip +“At a high level, *FPGAs offer massive parallelism, have a high GFLOPs potential, and their technology curve exceeds Moore's Law. FPGAs offer application-specific acceleration.* They can be (re)programmed at the factory or (as the name implies) in the field at a customer site. They are essentially specialized functional units that solve a specific problem, and are typically implemented as an algorithm-specific compute device – as a coprocessor to a conventional CPU motherboard. snip+ +“In one sense, *FPGAs are very much a commodity item and already have a range of uses*. The ability to reprogram FPGAs has led them to be widely used by hardware designers for prototyping ASICs, for software-designed radio, aerospace and defense systems, medical imaging, bioinformatics and more. And while FPGAs are inherently about 10 times slower than CPUs (clock speeds are typically 150-200MHz), *they can offer up to 100 times performance improvements on calculations optimized to run on them*. snip+ +“So why FPGAs, and why now? One view is that more sophisticated technology means financial services organizations are more susceptible to being arbitraged, and FPGAs can help prevent this, or trade to take advantage of it. UK consultant Detica has a couple of FPGA engagements at the very earliest stages of evaluation. Its pitch is that FPGAs can handle algorithmic trading processing requirements on the order of 150,000 transactions per second. It argues FPGAs are also a natural way of handling streaming environments. For example, they are already widely used for voice and video streaming. snip+ “Chris Swan VP, IT R&D at Credit Suisse argues FPGAs could be a tempting solution because, by encoding straight to dedicated hardware rather than running on general-purpose CPUs, they make possible performance levels that are three orders of magnitude better. In addition, because this applies more to performance/watt than performance/chip, it could potentially collapse a 1,000-node grid into an expansion card within a trader's workstation.” snip

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FPGAs in the Mainstream

It’s important to note that this is no small, specialized technology market, but one that is very much in the high-performance and consumer mainstream.  Recently Bryan Lewis, a vice president and chief analyst at Gartner Dataquest projected (“Gartner: FPGA/PLD market to grow 14 percent in '06”) that the market for FPGAs and PLDs will grow from $3.2B in 2005 to $6.7B by 2010 – including 14% growth in 2006 and another 18% in 2007.  Overall they project approximately a 16% compound annual growth rate through the end of the decade.

|“FPGAs have had the fastest growth for the last five years and that will continue for the foreseeable future” – Bryan Lewis, Gartner.

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Some of the Mainstream/Practical Uses for FPGAs

The FPGA has blossomed in recent years to take on a key role in driving cost-effective high performance in a broad sweep of applications (Altera, Lattice Semiconductor & Xilinx).  Here are just a few:

Common Traits and Common Benefits

What the Netezza implementation and the great majority of the uses mentioned earlier share is that they deal with data streams; filtering or performing functions on data as it streams through the device at high speed.  The FPGA is able execute its functionality on the data, without interrupting the flow of data through them – in effect, adding an in-line performance boost.  In this way, they can greatly accelerate performance in these applications over “brute force” CPU-based processing.

Conversely, these systems tend not to rely on the FPGA for recursive algorithms or processing requiring access of data from cache, memory or disk in non-sequential modes that might be more well-suited to CPU technologies.

Another trait many of these FPGA implementations have in common is that the very “field programmability” of the FPGA device gives the implementations themselves a high degree of design agility – allowing for easy and fast reprogramming of the functionality of the devices.

In addition, all of these applications lean on FPGA technology for performance at low power – making possible highly scalable high-performance solutions without breaking power and cooling budgets in the process.  This was evident in the commentary by Chris Swan of Credit Suisse in the above 451 Group story quotes and in the discussion of the 1000-node MPP RAMP project in my previous posting.

Particularly in networking, HPC and data warehousing, the FPGA provides speed and low power consumption combined with design agility – essentially supporting reprogramming of the functionality of the FPGA at start-up time.

FPGAs and Their High Performance Punch

But one of the most important uses of the FPGA technology is as an application-specific performance enhancer.  In HPC, FPGA technology is typically used to provide a performance boost.  SGI® touts the use of reconfigurable performance of its RASC™ module as a performance accelerator (emphasis mine).

|"SGI® RASC™ (Reconfigurable Application Specific Computing) technology leverages the power of FPGAs which utilize gate array technology that can be reconfigured by the user for optimal performance on a specific algorithm. Unlike traditional processors, which are serial in nature, FPGAs are inherently parallel, allowing multiple functions to be performed simultaneously. Therefore, users whose applications spend a majority of their run time working on a set of specific algorithms can dramatically reduce application run time by custom configuring the RASC module to accelerate application run-time. This reconfigurable technology is particularly beneficial when running data-intensive applications critical to oil and gas exploration, defense and intelligence, bioinformatics, medical imaging, broadcast media, and other data-dependent industries."

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Here’s a report on the effectiveness of FPGAs for supercomputing from an April 2005 FPGA Journal article discussing the new Cray XD1:

|<center>!http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n148/nzfrisco/Miscellaneous Figures/CrayXD1photo.jpg!</center>+The Cray XD1, one of the latest innovations from the world's best-known supercomputer manufacturer, leverages Xilinx's FPGA technology to provide massive algorithm acceleration through hardware-based implementation of compute-intensive algorithmic tasks.  While we in the editorial community were idly debating whether FPGAs might be useful as reconfigurable computing engines after all, Cray was busy at work back in the lab building the thing. "We are continually researching new ways to gain greater application performance for our customers," says Geert Wenes, business manager responsible for emerging markets at Cray.  "With the Cray XD1 direct connect architecture combined with the new generation of FPGAs, we saw an opportunity to gain orders of magnitude speed-up for some of our customers' most challenging applications.  Applications that are highly parallel on a fine-grained level and spend much of their computation time on integer and fixed point calculations, such as adaptive optics simulations, seismic imaging, or even molecular docking applications in life sciences stand to gain 10 times or more overall application performance improvement with FPGA application acceleration.  In many cases, such speed-ups are necessary to make the application a viable one for our customers."+

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And there are numerous others, even including Advanced Micro Devices and its use of accelerating co-processors based on FPGA technology with the current AMD64 line of processor boards.  Here are a few snippets of a 19th June Electronic Engineering Times article on the topic ("Programmable chips rev critical algorithms"):

|+"The first two companies to offer socket-compatible coprocessors for AMD64 Opteron processor sockets, DRC Computer Corp. and XtremeData Inc., are *delivering programmable solutions that can accelerate time-critical algorithms. These coprocessors leverage the flexibility of Xilinx and Altera FPGAs*, so that they can be configured to accelerate graphics, XML, floating-point, video transcoding and other applications. "Although the latest AMD64 processors offer topnotch performance, when it comes to specialized operations such as graphics, XML operations and video transcoding, they deliver good, but less than stellar, performance. To achieve improved system performance, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. has opened its processor socket interface as part of the just-released Torrenza platform to allow companies like DRC, XtremeData and others to develop and deploy application-specific coprocessors to work alongside AMD64 CPUs in multisocket processor systems. snip+ "In one possible scenario, an FPGA-based hardware accelerator used in medical CT imaging might run the overall application 10 times faster when each 3GHz AMD Opteron processor is coupled with an FPGA. The result is significant system-level savings for power, space and cost. 'The key to acceleration is parallelism of the algorithm implementation in the FPGA, so that even when the FPGA operates in the subgigahertz range, it can outperform a multigigahertz CPU,' said XtremeData CEO Ravi Chandran."

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Next Time: FPGAs Move Into Data Warehousing and the NPS Data Warehouse Appliance

The uses for the FPGA have expanded greatly in recent years to take on a key role in driving cost-effective high-performance in a broad sweep of applications.  I’ve also made some suggestions in this and my previous posting about how the same sort of technology is a key performance multiplier in the NPS data warehouse appliance.  In coming days, I’ll be posting the 3rd and final installment of this series on FPGAs, discussing the benefits that accrue to the Netezza system and what additional benefits of the FPGA might be possible as we progress the product forward in the future.

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Performance Multipliers for Data Stream Processing

 


“You could not step twice into the same stream; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.”  – Heraclitus, Greek Philosopher (ca. 535-475 BC)

 

 

Our last posting concentrated on the definition of Data Warehouse Appliances.  Today we’d like to go deeper, much deeper inside the architecture of the Netezza Performance Server® data warehouse appliance and focus on one of the key elements of the system’s performance.  We’re talking about a simple, common off-the-shelf device about the size of one’s thumbnail whose expansive capabilities at extremely low power consumption are changing the way people design high-performance, streaming systems.

 

The Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), sometimes referred to as a Programmable Logic Device (PLD), acts as a performance multiplier in the NPS® system, increasing query processing effectiveness by a factor as high as 5X and greatly reducing the need to move superfluous data through the system.

 

Shining Some Light on a Key Performance Engine

Philip Howard of the Bloor Group recently wrote that Netezza has kept its “light under a bushel” regarding the advantages of FPGAs in the NPS data warehouse appliance, so we’ll try to provide a little more information here.

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  • “So, What Is an FPGA?” – aimed at providing a most-basic introductory primer of the technology, its capabilities and its promise.

  • “FPGAs in the Mainstream & Some of Their Practical Uses” – a look at the use of FPGA technology across a broad swathe of market applications.

  • “OK – How Does Netezza Get a Performance Edge from FPGAs & What Does the Future Hold?” – linking FPGA capabilities to the benefits it brings to the NPS system and possible future directions it could enable.+{color}{size}

+This is the first of a brief, three-part series on FPGA which we will roll out over the coming days, spanning the following topics:

 

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FPGA technology is one of the key enablers of Netezza's performance and I'll talk about that some.  But I hope to show enough examples about the market for FPGAs in other domains as well, where they are providing a fundamental advantage – particularly in the domain of stream-based processing.

So, What Is an FPGA?

The OpenFPGA organization, an industry association of over 100 registered participants, defines an FPGA as,

FPGA: “An integrated circuit able to change interconnectivity of a large number of fundamental computing components via configuration information stored in onboard static RAM”.

Off-the-shelf, an FPGA is like blank canvas for systems designers.  It provides the speed and computational performance of hardware design while allowing for a very high degree of programmability and such characteristics as:

  • increasing speed & density;

  • increased I/O pin count and bandwidth;

  • lower power;

  • lower cost per gate; and

  • integration of hard IP (e.g., multipliers, PowerPC cores)We'll discuss it more in the second installation, but FPGAs are used for streaming data applications in a wide sweep of product markets – from consumer electronics, to medical applications to high-performance computing.  And the technology is evolving rapidly; in many cases taking on roles that have previously been the domain of CPU technologies.

In fact, the technological trends to drive down cost and power while driving up performance are moving faster for FPGA devices than Moore's Law is doing for CPU (e.g., Intel or AMD) technology.  Moore’s Law suggests a doubling of CPU performance approximately every 18-24 months, but FPGAs are progressing much faster.

A paper submitted to the Association of Computer Machinery (ACM) by Keith Underwood of Sandia National Laboratories details how FPGAs are outpacing gains in CPU technology, captured best with this quote:

|“FPGA performance is increasing by 4× every two years.  For operations that use the architectural improvements in FPGAs, performance is increasing at a rate of 5× every two years.  Projecting these trends forward yields an order of magnitude advantage in peak performance for FPGAs by 2009.”

 

 

| Underwood’s paper focused on the FPGA’s growing advantages in floating point calculation performance, but others have talked not only about processing horsepower but also advances in both I/O and memory bandwidth speeds, as shown in the following figure. !http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n148/nzfrisco/Miscellaneous Figures/OpenFPGAChart.png!

 

Source: “OpenFPGA BOF Presentation”\ at SC05 Aussie Schnore (GE Global Research) & Malachy Devlin (Nallatech), 16 Nov 2005</center>|</center>

 

Enabling & Accelerating Future Technologies

Even at Intel, the leading vendor of the “x86” CPU devices and now in pursuit of an aggressive roadmap of multi-core, multi-GHz processors, the use of FPGA technology is being explored.  In a February 2006 ACM presentation entitled “Future of Computer Architecture”, Dr. David Patterson of UC Berkeley presented early results of a project called “Research Accelerator for Multiple Processors” (RAMP).  The RAMP study included over 30 participants, from among the industry’s foremost leaders including, among many others: Gordon Bell of Microsoft, Intel CTO Justin Rattner and Sun Fellow Ivan Sunderland.

FPGA technology made the RAMP study of next generation computing architectures possible, by using the devices in a high-performance, low-cost 1000-node MPP processor grid that would otherwise have been prohibitive in both cost and complexity.

|The researchers also found that FPGAs were powerful enough for the task today and getting better; and that the use of FPGA technology was critical to allow RAMP to “ramp up research in multiprocessing via common research platform to innovate across fields to hasten a sea change from sequential to parallel computing”.

 

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More to Come, Shortly...

I hope I've given you an adequate primer of what FPGAs are and how they are progressing technologically.  For more info, follow some of the links I've provided or connect with OpenFPGA, the HPCWire or other industry organizations affiliated with FPGA technology.

In our next installment of this series, entitled. “FPGAs in the mainstream & some of their practical uses”, we’ll look at how FPGA and programmable logic devices are playing a vital role in mainstream and high-performance applications, driving up performance and efficiency while driving down costs, time-to-market and power consumption.  Come back in a few days for more of the story.





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"Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship... the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth."  – Peter Drucker (1909-2005), from Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 1985

 

 

Accelerating Innovation – Notes from the 2006 Netezza User Conference

This has been a big week for Netezza and the Netezza marketing team.  We've just completed the 2nd Annual Netezza International User Conference at the Boston Seaport Hotel with 100% attendance growth over last year's conference.  The company also had ten customer and/or partner press releases in the same period, spanning virtually all of our markets.  Wednesday morning, Netezza CFO Pat Scannell told the audience at the closing session that the attendees included over 360 people, including customers, partners, analysts and prospects.

These attendees did, quite literally, represent a global audience for the event - coming in to participate in the event from Asia, Australia, Europe, Africa, and both North and South America (only 6-of-7 continents covered – there were no attendees from Antarctica that I know of), including 55 from Europe and Asia, alone.

The incredibly strong attendance demonstrated Netezza's dominant leadership in the Data Warehouse Appliance market, as I daresay no other vendor in or aspiring to this market category could have mounted even 1/3rd the level of participation.  As Netezza President and COO, Jim Baum put things in his closing remarks of the User Conference Wednesday morning:bq. "We have always been focused on the Netezza community, but it's clear from what we've seen over the past year that there is a real change... something of a tipping point is happening here... There is something that is bigger than just Netezza that is changing the course of BI and Data Warehousing for the future... and you, our customers & partners, are leading the industry in that change."

In a "show of force" of their own, many of the UK participants (employees, customers, partners and prospects alike) had fun sporting customised "Netezza in the UK" tee shirts on opening day (Yeah, baby!).  Jolly good.  And the international dinner on Monday was, well, quite International - it was great to share the dinner table(s) in Boston's North End with people from Australia, Brasil, France, Italy, Japan, Mexico, UK, Spain and elsewhere.

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As for the sessions themselves – in my admittedly-subjective view, the User Conference provided a mix of detailed technology & product information alongside numerous customer and partner business case studies.    If anything, there was a request to provide more opportunities to view multiple sessions that spanned the four tracks of the conference.  The 1-hour sessions included more than ten customer case studies, four partner case study sessions and seven technical sessions about the Netezza product and roadmap plans.  And after the conference, through Friday, there were a number of follow-on training courses for customers, partners and employees.


A Few Great Quotes From the Plaza Ballroom Sessions
Monday Afternoon "Keynote"
"The target market for these portable pocket radios was teenagers, the rebar of humanity" – Professor Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School
Tuesday Morning "Customer Panel"
"Is there anything that you can't do with Netezza today that you used to do?" – Mark Beyer, Research Director, Gartner
"We don't need to send big checks to 3rd party vendors anymore for DW consulting services." – Jagpal Jheeta, Business Systems Manager, Debenhams
Wednesday Morning "Partner Perspective"
"Data Mart versus Data Warehouse?  That question is simply irrelevant" – Donald MacCormick, Vice President of Product Marketing, Business Objects

Opening Keynotes

The Opening Keynote addresses were delivered on Monday afternoon by Motorola Chairman and CEO Ed Zander as well as author & Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen (author of The Innovator's Dilemma,  The Innovator's Solution, and Seeing What's Next

  • Understand the job that the innovation will be hired to do* Allow competitors to flee, not fight by choosing an innovation entry path that may disrupt incumbents from below, but not directly attack them and* Identify who the right customers are by competing in a new market whose members' alternate choice might be non-consumption.Professor Christensen closed by saying that from what he understood of Netezza and its growing presence in the market, the company and our Data Warehouse Appliance could very-well be characterized as a "New Market Disruption".{size}

). Ed delivered the keynote with his typical high-energy panache and global view of the industry.  He told the opening audience of well over 400 how excited he was for Netezza and its future.  One of his missions at Motorola, he said, is to keep looking at disruptive technologies for his business. Using so-called "Whack Meetings", Ed encourages leaders at Motorola to whack their businesses before the competitors have a chance to.  He told the crowd that Motorola's philosophy of accelerated innovation is based on a major disruptive shift, or "The Big Idea" (in Motorola's business, today that's 'seamless mobility'). Then Ed responded to questions from the audience for nearly 30 minutes – all the while as Motorola was finalizing its $3.9B acquisition of Symbol Technologies, Inc., his company's largest acquisition in nearly seven years.  And shortly after his appearance on-stage with us, Ed had to be ready to hustle over for an interview on CNBC. <center>|<center>!http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n148/nzfrisco/Netezza User Conference 2006/IMGP0615.jpg!</center>|<center>!http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n148/nzfrisco/Netezza User Conference 2006/IMGP0604.jpg!</center>|<center>!http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n148/nzfrisco/Netezza User Conference 2006/IMGP0614.jpg!</center>|</center> Then Clayton Christensen came on-stage and with milk shake optimization as one of his use-cases, demonstrated that in order to enable a winning "New Market Disruption" strategy for introducing Disruptive Innovation to the market, his research had led him to three primary requirements:

Tuesday Keynote & Panel

On Tuesday, Netezza CEO Jit Saxena led off the morning with our vision of how "Netezza appliances position companies for the demands of tomorrow’s BI" and ushered in the morning's panel discussion before the swelling crowd in the large Plaza Ballroom.  The panel was led by Gartner Research Director, Mark Beyer and included Kelly Carrigan, Senior Director of Database Architecture with Catalina Marketing, Jagpal Jheeta, Business Systems Manager of Debenhams, and Emory Heisler, Vice President of Information Technology Services, Healthcare Analytics Group with Wolters-Kluwer Health.

 

Jit's presentation went back to Netezza's founding principles and why those are still very much what matter today with the dynamically growing uses of data warehouse systems and especially  data warehouse appliances being pushed by megatrends.  "Netezza" he said, "has re-energized the data warehouse market and is the clear leader in the data warehouse appliance segment."  Jit also stressed the importance of Community to Netezza – in terms of its 75  customers as well as partners, resellers and employees.  And he gave a broadened vision for the future of data warehouse appliances that will deepen their impact, broaden their use cases and move appliances to the forefront as a competitive weapon for our customers to use.

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Note: Watch for much more on these topics in this space in the weeks to come.

 

Mark opened this segment with a brief presentation on Gartner's perspective of Data Warehouse Trends - specifically noting the trends toward balanced disk-I/O-memory-processor systems, larger and more complex workloads of users and growing data volumes. He also discussed the importance of "high-value users" in increasing the value of the data warehouse and the dimensions of use & users that most data warehouses now experience.  Then he turned to the panel members for their perspectives.  Responding to questions from Mark and several more from the floor, Kelly, Jagpal and Emory recounted how large a difference the transition to the NPS data warehouse in their data warehouse operations had been – in terms of much higher productivity, simpler operations & maintenance, reduced latency and bottom-line results.

!http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n148/nzfrisco/Netezza User Conference 2006/IMGP0628.jpg!

 

Next the conference moved headlong into the series of four parallel track sessions for the remainder of the day – a veritable sprint through 24 one-hour sessions with the occasional break for refreshments and for colleagues to share their learnings from the various presentations that they had seen.  The Netezza presentations included everything from how (and why) the architecture of the NPS appliance is what it is "from the inside out", to achieving optimal performance with the NPS system to the product roadmap plans over the next 15-months, with several other items in-between.  Customers' case study presentations (thirteen of them, in all) ranged the gamut of experiences in the decision-making to purchase a company's first NPS appliance, to detailed performance benefits and applications, to full-up business return-on-investment resulting directly from having deployed the NPS system.

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Tuesday evening we all reconvened on the Odyssey cruise ship for a "Vegas Night" evening of fun, food and libation, along with a great session with Ben Mezrich, author of "Bringing Down the House: The True Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions" and "Ugly Americans", both of which are currently being made into feature-length films.  Quite literally just back from his honeymoon, Ben shared some of the great anecdotes that have come from research on his books and from having been essentially embedded on an MIT card-counting team.  The laughs were plentiful, but they also showed how effectively the careful and appropriate analysis of data could be used to create a highly-leveraged strategic advantage (i.e., win millions of dollars from irate casino operators).

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And Then It Was Done

And finally, Wednesday morning arrived with some reflective views about the conference from Pat Scannell, on the state of BI from Donald MacCormack of Business Objects, and on the Netezza roadmap for technology direction by Bill Blake, Netezza's SVP of Development.

Donald's sharp wit, understanding of the industry and rapid-fire delivery was just the jolt of adrenaline everyone needed to start the morning after the previous night's "frivolities".  He summarized the effect that Netezza's data warehouse appliance is having in the industry when teamed with partners like Business Objects as, "leading the second revolution in Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing".

 

Bill Blake's presentation started from the basis of the accepted role of the Netezza Data Warehouse Appliance in the enterprise data center: customers no longer have to "settle" for weak performance, high expense and/or high degrees of complexity for their data warehouses.  His presentation outlined the technology directions that will extend the capabilities of the NPS system forward and deliver unprecedented price-performance leadership building off key elements of the Netezza AMPPTM architecture for accelerating analytic database applications.  Included in Bill's presentation was our roadmap to enable the Data Warehouse to "graduate from algebraic set operations on tables to the calculus of predictive analytics."  Following Bill, Jim Baum's brief closing remarks (quoted above) put the whole event in perspective.

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Note: Just as with Jit's comments, watch for much more discussion in this space in the weeks to come.

 

Before we knew it, the conference was over and people were preparing for their travels home and/or elsewhere.  There were many warm handshakes and good-byes all around, along with 5-10 minute synopses of the things we had shared, learned and done over the past 72-hours.  And the marketing team drew a collective sigh, thanked our luck for the fabulous Boston weather and clinked glasses all around before we (gasp!) again begin planning for next year's Conference.

We in Marketing had a great time putting this together and having it come off as well as it did and we hope that all of our guests enjoyed themselves and took a substantial amount of new innovative ideas away to help accelerate their businesses with Netezza.  We hope to see you all (and then some!) at the 2007 International User Conference...  ...and we'll see you back at this blog and elsewhere in the Netezza Community!

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Issue 1: Welcome!

Posted by Administrator Sep 15, 2006

“In creating, the only hard thing is to begin: a grass blade's no easier to make than an oak.” - James Russell Lowell, American Poet & Diplomat (1819-1891)

 

Welcome to the inaugural issue of “Thoughts from Inside the Box” – Netezza’s first officially endorsed blog.

 

 

What’s this blog about?

Well, we hope you’ll be comfortable here and feel free to engage in lively commentary on the thoughts and ideas we and others propose here.  We know that Technorati is currently tracking about 53 million blogs and according to a recent NPR story, there are about 2 new blogs and 18 postings created every second of every day (Search Site Tracks Blogosphere's Rapid Expansion).  To get your repeated attention, we know that what we say in this space has to be relevant, meaningful, interesting and timely – TO YOU.  We’ll do our best to make it so – but your interactions and comments can be instrumental as well.

 

Our goal is to take informal looks at industry issues and trends in Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence, as well as providing information about Netezza and its product offerings in a more casual setting than is found in Netezza’s primary home page and marketing messaging.  We also plan to mix the serious industry and “vision thing” discussions in with more casual, sometimes far-afield, and even irreverent, ideas of the day in the hopes of jostling your thoughts and encouraging discussion.

 

Netezza has had some major accomplishments since its founding in late-2000.  Having moved from early phase start-up, and arguably to creating the industry category of Data Warehouse Appliances, with over 75 customers and growing, Netezza has earned a fair-share of the data warehouse systems market (Independent analyst firm recognizes Netezza as the Data Warehouse Appliance market leader).  And we have even higher aspirations for the future.  We thought it was time for us to create a more reachable venue for people interested in Netezza to find out more about our thoughts.

 

 

Who’s writing this blog?

Primarily I plan on being the principal author of this blog: Phil Francisco – the Product Marketing Director here at Netezza.  But we also look forward to frequent contributing posts from several members of the broader Netezza community including VP of Marketing, Ellen Rubin, Netezza’s SVP of Development, Bill Blake and other executives – along with occasional postings from customers, partners and other industry thought-leaders.

 

 

So come on in and make yourself at home – often!

There’s much more to come, beginning with some of our thoughts on just what a Data Warehouse Appliance (DWA) is and where we think the market for DWAs is headed next.

 

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