Netezza’s Not Dead: It’s Just Ascended

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Netezza, the IBM-owned, hardware-accelerated data warehousing hybrid, is now generally available (GA) in the cloud on either IBM Cloud or AWS.

The unexpected pivot to offer a cloud-based Netezza was announced last month by IBM (which had previously planned to kill it off.) Now it’s a reality: days before on-premises support was slated to end on June 30.

(IBM bought Netezza in 2010 for $1.7 billion. At the time, as we reported, Netezza had 350 major clients including Time Warner, Estee Lauder, United HealthGroup, Nationwide Insurance, NYSE Euronext and Virgin Media.)

IBM now claims shifting workloads to the cloud will be pain-free.

“It’s not a migration—it’s a lift and shift,” says Big Blue’s product lead, Miran Badzak adding: “nzbackup your appliance to IBM Cloud Object Storage or Amazon S3—nzrestore into your cloud data warehouse. Or, simply run nz_migrate. It’s about as drama-free move to cloud as anyone can make it.”

Drama, previously, had abounded, with customers and resellers left frustrated by the announced end of support at short notice, then an equally unexpected May 2020 announcement that Netezza was being given a reprieve.

IBM seemingly invigorated by the ability to virtualise workloads with the help of Red Hat-developed tools, meanwhile says Netezza innovation will now “continue at breakneck speeds”. (How’s that for a U-turn?)

(Badzak highlighted all the “hard work and ingenuity that’s been on display by our engineering team as they worked to bring Netezza to cloud. Taking what used to be an extremely tight coupling of hardware and software and deploying it on a modular, commodity-hardware infrastructure is no easy task.”)

Hungry startups meanwhile are snapping at the heels of some of those chunky workloads. A likely frustration: what they have been promising potential customers would be a clunky, costly and complex migration off the platform now looks set to be pretty straightforward (for those yet to make it…)

Businesses unconvinced by recent vacillation on IBM’s part could take a last minute closer look at either Yellowbrick or SQream, which offer variations on the theme: integrated software and hardware appliances that slot into a data centre rack that can power major DB workloads, with similar enterprise integrations to Netezza for LDAP, SNMP, syslog, but arguably a host of improvements including more scalability and richer detail.