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Netezza launched the Skimmer data-warehouse appliance on January 25, 2010. The 7U rack-mountable system supported up to 10 TB and was aimed at small and midsize businesses and enterprise departments that did not need the scale of Netezza’s full-rack TwinFin appliance.
Netezza did not publish a Skimmer price in the announcement. It said only that the system would cost less than TwinFin’s cited list-price benchmark of $20,000 per terabyte. The company also previewed two future directions: a higher-capacity system and a memory-intensive appliance intended for real-time analytics.
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What Netezza actually launched
Skimmer was an integrated data-warehouse appliance: a combined platform of servers, storage, database software and specialized processing hardware. Its 7U chassis was substantially smaller than the full-rack systems Netezza sold to larger enterprise customers.
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The launch expanded Netezza’s product range downward. A company with a departmental data mart, a regional business unit or a warehouse measured in tens rather than hundreds of terabytes could consider an appliance without buying a petabyte-class configuration. The announcement reported that Netezza had more than 300 customers at the time, with the company competing for business against Teradata, Oracle and IBM.
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“Up to 10 TB” was a maximum stated capacity, not necessarily the amount of usable space available after formatting, redundancy, compression or operational reserve. The announcement also did not provide a detailed performance specification or benchmark for every workload.
Skimmer versus TwinFin
| Attribute | Skimmer | TwinFin |
|---|---|---|
| Form factor | 7U rack-mountable chassis | Full-rack appliance |
| Capacity stated in the 2010 report | Up to 10 TB | Up to 1 PB |
| Intended market | Small and midsize businesses and enterprise departments | Larger enterprise data warehouses |
| Price information | Netezza said it would be below TwinFin’s benchmark | $20,000 per TB list price cited by Netezza |
| Core approach | Intel blade servers with FPGA-based networking and acceleration | Intel blade servers with FPGA-based networking and acceleration |
The comparison was primarily about capacity, physical scale and price positioning. It does not establish that Skimmer delivered identical throughput, concurrency or query behavior to TwinFin. A smaller appliance could be the better fit for a modest warehouse, but it also offered less room for growth and could become uneconomical if data volumes rapidly approached its ceiling.
The $20,000-per-terabyte figure was a list-price benchmark for TwinFin cited in the contemporary report, not an independently verified transaction price. Likewise, “less expensive” does not identify Skimmer’s actual purchase price or discount.
How the Netezza architecture worked
Netezza described its design as Asymmetric Massively Parallel Processing, or AMPP. In plain English, the appliance divided database work across many processing components instead of relying on one large general-purpose server.
- Host systems coordinated queries and distributed work.
- Intel CPU blades performed database processing in parallel.
- FPGAs provided specialized networking and data-processing assistance close to the storage and processing path.
- Standard connectivity included SQL access through ODBC, JDBC and OLE DB interfaces.
Later descriptions of Netezza systems commonly discuss FPGA-assisted filtering, compression and decompression. Those explanations help describe the broader Netezza approach, but they should not be treated as a complete launch-day specification for every Skimmer configuration.
The two products Netezza was hinting at
A higher-capacity appliance
Netezza said it was planning a system with greater capacity than TwinFin’s reported maximum of 1 PB. The contemporary report associated the possible name Cruiser with trademark filings, but Cruiser was not a fully announced product with confirmed specifications or a firm shipping date on January 25, 2010.
Later IBM documentation identifies Cruiser with the Netezza High Capacity Appliance C1000. That retrospective evidence supports the connection, but it does not change the status of Cruiser in the original announcement: at that point, it was a teased future direction and a reported inference rather than a complete product launch.
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1Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems2Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches3Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsA memory-intensive real-time analytics appliance
The second planned system was described as a more memory-intensive appliance for customers seeking real-time analytics. The report suggested Pintail as a likely name based on trademark filings.
Netezza did not provide a RAM specification, latency target, benchmark, workload limit or availability date for this system. “Real-time analytics” therefore describes the intended market and product direction, not a measured Skimmer performance claim.
Why the announcement mattered
Skimmer represented a portfolio strategy rather than a replacement for TwinFin. Netezza was trying to make the appliance model available at multiple scales:
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- Smaller entry point: A 7U system could be more practical for a department or midmarket company than a full rack.
- Simpler deployment: An integrated appliance reduced the need to assemble and tune a conventional warehouse stack from separate servers, storage and database components.
- Broader competitive reach: Netezza could pursue customers considering Teradata, Oracle, IBM or competing appliance and scale-out products.
- Coverage of future workloads: The teased products pointed toward both extreme capacity and memory-heavy, lower-latency analytics.
There were trade-offs. A smaller system could broaden adoption but also intensify price competition and produce less revenue per customer. Buyers had to weigh the convenience of an integrated platform against proprietary hardware, vendor dependence, limited expansion headroom and the cost of migrating if growth exceeded the chosen tier.
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Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.MapReduce and advanced analytics were future promises
Netezza’s marketing executive also said the company would soon announce improvements involving MapReduce functionality and advanced analytics inside the appliance. The January announcement did not specify implementation details, supported languages, release versions or benchmark results.
Those capabilities should therefore be understood as near-term promises reported in January 2010, not as features that were necessarily available in Skimmer on launch day. Later historical material associated Netezza with programming models including Hadoop, MapReduce, Java, C++ and Python in a February 2010 announcement, but that later development should not be retroactively presented as part of Skimmer’s original specification.
What happened to the product names
Later IBM documentation provides useful historical context for the naming:
- Skimmer was later referred to as the IBM Netezza 100.
- TwinFin was later referred to as the IBM Netezza 1000.
- Cruiser was later associated with the Netezza High Capacity Appliance C1000.
IBM’s documentation also shows that hardware families were not interchangeable in every support or upgrade context. Some Netezza 100 and 1000 systems could not move directly from 5.0.x to 7.1.0.x and required an intermediate 6.0.x release. Skimmer also did not support the MantraVM service documented for TwinFin systems, so compliance and auditing capabilities should not be assumed to be identical.
For historical owners, hardware replacement and diagnostics required identifying the exact appliance family before following IBM’s procedures. Redundancy could help a system tolerate some failures, but it did not remove the need for model-specific support work.
Historical support and buying implications
Skimmer is a legacy product, not a current new-equipment recommendation. IBM withdrawal notices cite end-of-marketing and end-of-support dates for specified Netezza 1000 configurations, including June 20, 2014, and June 30, 2019, respectively. Those dates should not be generalized to every Netezza configuration, but they illustrate the lifecycle risk around this product generation.
Anyone evaluating an existing Skimmer installation should verify the exact model, software release, maintenance entitlement, replacement-parts availability, backup and export process, and a realistic migration path. A refurbished listing alone does not establish that the hardware is supportable or that the required software licenses remain valid.
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Quick Recap
Sources
- Computerworld: “Netezza launches Skimmer data appliance, teases two more”
- IBM: Supported systems and upgrades
- IBM: RHEL 5.x support for PureData appliances
- IBM: Netezza 1000 withdrawal notification
- IBM: MantraVM defined
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