Datacenter Automation on Ulitzer

Right before Oracle started flooding the airways with talk of complete systems and appliances Wednesday, its little data warehousing rival Netezza slipped out Skimmer, a cut-down, non-expandable version of its five-month-old Intel blade-based 1PT TwinFin appliance.

It's targeted at development groups and data marts and can serve as a platform for "application appliances."

The pitch is that by deploying throughout the enterprise, data-driven decisions and strategies can maintain competitive advantage.

Oracle Larry Ellison sees Netezza trying to compete against his Exadata machine and claims that, if IBM can't cut it, how is a pricey newcomer like Netezza supposed to. He claims Netezza's software is "primitive" and the company focused on hardware while allowing that its "brute force" is okay for a certain type of problems. But then what else is he going to say, he wants to sell a lot of Exadatas.

Anyway, the Skimmer, which bows ahead of an expected Datallegro-based entry from Microsoft later this year, can handle a maximum 10TB of data, comes in a 7U rack-mountable chassis, and runs $12,000-$13,000 a TB, cheaper than the TwinFin's $20,000 a TB.

Netezza anticipates partners will leverage Skimmer to create application appliances. It said Kalido's got a Skimmer-based Kona Information Appliance, a pre-built, customizable information delivery solution that will be offered as a vertically oriented appliance to industries such as pharmaceuticals and insurance.