Netezza Corporation, a provider of data warehouse and analytic appliances, has introduced the Netezza TwinFin i-Class appliance, a development and execution platform that allows analytical applications to be run inside the appliance and close to the data.
Based on Netezza's data streaming technology, the Netezza TwinFin i-Class appliance executes complex analytics in parallel within the database on extremely large data sets to reduce costs, and eliminate errors and delays organizations currently incur by moving data into specialized databases for advanced analytics.
The TwinFin i-Class is another step in the evolution of Netezza appliances, Phil Francisco, vice president, product management and product marketing, Netezza, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "It is meant to be the merging of the very large data sets that you get in data warehousing and typical business analytics, with the advanced math or ‘big math' that goes on around predictive analysis or optimization techniques." The requirements for this type of processing tend to be well beyond what can be done using standard SQL, Francisco says. "It really requires higher level languages and capabilities like linear algebra and other types of mathematical techniques to get at the answers for an enterprise."
The massively parallel processing architecture of the Netezza TwinFin i-Class appliance powers and simplifies the computational complexity of big data when building and applying advanced analytics in parallel. The appliance enables customers and partners to easily create analytic applications using industry proven tools, such as SAS, traditional programming languages (Java, C++, Python, Fortran), new programming environments (MapReduce, Hadoop) and open source tools such as R. Netezza TwinFin i-Class also provides plug-ins to the Eclipse IDE and the R graphical user interface for development support using Netezza's simple appliance paradigm.
By bringing advanced mathematics right inside the TwinFin appliance, Netezza enables partners and customers to run advanced analytical algorithms right down where the data is stored. "That means that they will be able to run against the full set of data, up to petabytes of information, and they will also get the performance of this massively parallel processing engine that we call TwinFin, and get 10 to 100 times performance on their advanced functionality like predictive analytics and optimization techniques," says Francisco.
Just because the world went into a recession in the last year and a half doesn't mean that data growth has stopped at all, he notes. "If anything, data growth continues, and continues to be viewed as a strategic asset of companies." However, Francisco says, the key is "not just collecting it and storing it. It is how quickly you can turn it from information that you have collected about the market into information that you are using actively to help drive your business. That's what the TwinFin and the TwinFin i-Class are really all about."
General availability of the Netezza TwinFin i-Class appliance and additional announcements regarding market momentum and partner ecosystem are planned for the Company's Enzee Universe, 2010 User Conference in June. For more information about Netezza, go here.