Netezza pre-announced last week that they will be moving to a new architecture – one based around IBM blades (Linux + Intel + RAM) with commodity SAS disks, RAID controllers, and NICs. The product will continue to rely on an FPGA, but that would sit much further from the disks & RAID controller, beyond the RAM but adjacent to the Intel CPU, in contrast to their previous product line.
In assembling a new hardware stack, Netezza calls this re-architecture as a change but not really a change – the FPGA will continue to offload data compression/decompression, selection and projection from the Intel CPU; the Intel CPU will be used to push-down joins and group bys; the RAM will be used to enable caching (thus helping improve mixed workload performance).
I think this is a pretty significant change for Netezza.
Mayank Bawa is the Chief Customer Officer and co-founder of