back to article RIP Netezza, IBM’s FPGA-powered data warehousing dream

IBM is finally pulling the plug on Netezza, a family of data warehousing and analytics appliances that have been around for the past 15 years. Most of the models have reached the end of support, and no new Netezza boxes will ever be made - IBM has effectively killed the brand, and salted the earth. This sounds surprising, …

  1. Mage Silver badge
    Linux

    But, But,

    The Cloud and Serverless are people selling services. However ultimately the Rental Megacorps have real buildings with racks of real servers.

    It's not about the Cloud making these obsolete, but IBM's continuing strategy of ditching HW or selling off HW brands to be a services only company. I guess no-one in China wanted to buy the Netezza brand as the HW is too old?

    Hence the purchase of Redhat and others before that. The mystery is why they bought Netezza in the first place only nine years ago?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: But, But,

      "Hence the purchase of Redhat and others before that. The mystery is why they bought Netezza in the first place only nine years ago?"

      Because IBM likes to buy companies where the customers are heavily invested, jack up licence and support costs and sit back and reel in the money until enough customers leave and they sell it on to someone that might actually try to develop the product further.

      Disclaimer: A previous employer was sold Netezza as a way of reducing the need for expensive DBA's to manage their data warehouses, only to discover it wasn't the all singing, all dancing solution they thought it was. It was expensive compared to our existing systems with shared high performance SAN's but probably better than general purpose systems that they were replacing at other customers..

      1. Mage Silver badge
        Thumb Up

        Re: But, But,

        Vulture Capitalists rather than Venture Capitalists. No slur intended against the Vulture here implied.

  2. Gordon 10
    FAIL

    Hmm DB2 or a Postgres Relative . (IBM fail)

    Lets see.

    DB2 or Redshift or Greenplum or even RedHatDB. Im betting the conversion difficulty is lesser to another Postgres fork....

  3. Alistair
    Windows

    Had 4 of these on the floor

    -- started the linux invasion at previous employer. At the time (2001 or so) were pretty bleeding edge.

    When we decommed it, because of data disposal rules, I spent 2 days on the floor, pulling 500G hard disks off the SPUs and binning them for destruction.

    I also know two of the individuals that were bought into IBM at the time. They departed IBM around the time I got sold to IBM. One at least walked off with a decent package.

  4. Howard Hanek
    Happy

    It Was More Like a Fog

    .... a very dense fog.

  5. Ian Michael Gumby
    Boffin

    Meh. Nothing new here.

    Considering that most of IBM's customers have been moving their 'legacy' Neteeza warehouses to Hadoop Data Lakes over the past 5-6 years, it makes perfect sense.

    Sorry but Hadoop could do what Neteeza could do at a fraction of the cost.

    Just keeping it real.

    1. FozzyBear
      Pirate

      Re: Meh. Nothing new here.

      You're absolutely right there. IBM offering has nothing new or compelling, in fact, it's embarrassing compared to other offerings out in the market.

  6. baka

    weird, just met the product managers at DellWorld a few months ago and was working with them on a project...

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    another IBM success story...

    Or, IOW

    "Nobody made a profit by being bought out by IBM" (to paraphrase the old saying).

    Netezza went kaput? Probably down to nothing else than they were bought by IBM. Being subjected to those years of IBM micro-mismanagement is enough to kill ANY company.

  8. wessexchap

    You missed the Makos.

    Unfortunately the article has forgotten the Mako line N3001-0xx (including the Mini-mako - N3001-001 which didn't include FPGAs) which whilst past the End-of-Marketing (Apr 2018) has no End-of-Support date: https://www-01.ibm.com/software/support/lifecycleapp/PLCSearch.wss?q=n3001&ibm-search=Search

    Also the fact that the INZA in-database analytics functions (which were part of the appeal to quite a few customers) were incorporated into DB2-Blu Cloud offerings and DashDB - which is now just DB2 on IBM Cloud. So the Netezza tech is not quite entirely gone...

    Spark was probably the bigger reason for the end of the FPGA based hardware, given you could just shove memory at the problem rather than having large, expensive tin which needed dedicated space and links to your network.

    I worked on these boxes for a couple of years, and everyone I met (albeit a limited number) loved their simplicity and speed. As hardware I won't miss replacing HDDs every week, but as a data warehouse tool I thought they were great.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    But is it Really Dead?

    Check out the new "IBM Performance Server for PostgreSQL" that IBM just released. Smells a lot like a Netezza to me... https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/ZB43B1YJ

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not dead

    Just need to read through the announcement of IBM Cloud Pak for Data System

  11. CRConrad

    Three orders of magnitude off.

    ...IBM purchased the Delaware business in 2010 for $1.7bn. [ . . . ] And yes, IBM paid megabucks for it.
    Gigabucks, actually.

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