I’ve not met Phil Francisco, but the performance improvement in this announcement has come about via a hardware re-architecture. This is not simply an upgrade of PowerPC with Intel – it is a change in the hardware dataflow pipeline, and this change will imply changes in the software architecture.

We (i.e., the market) have visibility into the Netezza hardware stack via their blog posts and white papers.

In the old architecture, the data flow used to be: 1 Disk -> FPGA -> PowerPC -> 1GB RAM.

In the new architecture, the data flow will be: 8 Disks -> RAID Controller -> 16 GB RAM -> FPGA -> Intel CPU. The Intel CPU would have received data at the same linespeed as the FPGA, but we have FPGA offloading processing from the Intel CPU.

Notice that the old architecture was explained by saying that higher performance is obtained by bringing processing right next to the disk (i.e., Disk -> FPGA). Netezza internal benchmarks claim higher performance for this new architecture (i.e., Disk -> Controller -> RAM caching -> FPGA) – clearly custom processing right next to disk was not adding any more value.

Netezza and Aster are providing a solution to the same groups and for the same wants of (1) and (2).

The use of commodity hardware is a means to an end. The end user may-or-may-not care about commodity hardware – but s/he certainly cares about its implications (lower cost, incremental scaling, replacement of parts without replacing the whole, faster year-on-year performance improvements, …) and limitations (higher failure rates, higher error margins, inefficient network & disk accesses).

However, I think it’s a stretch to say that “Netezza would not have invested in this change… if Netezza’s old FPGA-dominant hardware was not being out-priced and out-performed by our Intel-based commodity hardware..”

They have not removed the FPGAs from their architecture (They added more FPGAs) and it’s difficult to read much into their new position in the pipeline without knowing NZ’s software architecture in detail, which no one does.

It seems more likely that they needed to move away from PowerPC CPUs (which are clearly dying) and took the opportunity to simplify their hardware design for future upgrades.

Speaking to Phil Fransisco last spring (re compression) he said that he felt that Netezza still had considerable runway to improve their performance and this announcement bears that out. They have not indicated any additional moves to a pure software / commodity hardware approach.

I would suggest that Aster and Netezza are selling to somewhat different groups and in Netezza’a case that group wants 1) the absolute best possible query performance 2) for a large but not infinite amount of data and 3) don’t give a stuff about commodity hardware.

Just my opinion of course.