Netezza Compress Engine
Netezza Corporation (NYSE Arca: NZ) introduced the Compress Engine, which doubles the performance of their enterprise-class streaming analytic(TM) appliance. Netezza achieved the performance improvement through a patent-pending algorithm designed to increase performance while decreasing data footprint. Netezza’s patented streaming architecture leverages field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and other commodity components to place processing power next to the data, so data analysis occurs at the source at streaming speeds, delivering an unprecedented boost in performance.
Netezza’s streaming architecture is built on the FPGA-Accelerated Streaming Technology (FAST) Engines(TM) framework, which consists of several analytic functions that are programmed and customized at run-time in the FPGA to deliver performance advantages and enhanced capabilities for the NPS system.
The Compress Engine doubles query performance through a software enhancement to the NPS appliance. Employing a patent-pending method for compiling columnar data in all tables of the database, the NPS system will be able to compress the data to use disk much more effectively and greatly increase query performance as data streams from the disk.
Unlike traditional compression approaches used by several of the competitive data warehousing vendors, Netezza’s Compress Engine is designed primarily for performance improvement, and not merely to reduce data sizes and system footprints. Other compute-intensive approaches typically mitigate any performance gains, or result in a performance degradation to accomplish the compression effects, whereas Netezza’s approach delivers a significant boost in performance.
As data is loaded, inserted or updated into the NPS appliance it is automatically compressed into a compiled format, column-by-column, with the original data replaced by the Compress Engine “instruction set” for decompilation. Then, as this data is read from the disk during query operations, the Compress Engine reads its instruction set and reassembles the original data as it streams from the disk, effectively doubling the streaming data rate.
The FAST Engines framework also lays the foundation for ongoing innovation and new product capabilities, such as encryption and security, which will broaden the role of appliances throughout the enterprise.
The Compress Engine will be available as a feature in the NPS product family in May 2008 for new and existing customers.
More info: Netezza
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