The AI revolution is here, but so are the multitude of data challenges that organizations now face to effectively make AI work for them. When it comes to scaling new workloads, traditional cloud data warehouses have left customers with over-provisioning, vendor lock-in, and are limited in their ability to optimize both high performance analytics and AI workloads.

Businesses today have a choice: either they self-disrupt or get disrupted by newer and more agile business models. These models have successfully operationalized and scaled analytics and AI on all data no matter where the data resides. AI today is multi-model on multi-cloud. Adoption of new AI workloads requires the ability to operate on very large and varied machine learning datasets on a trusted hybrid cloud architecture. What’s needed is a new data foundation that unifies all types of data for analytics and AI at scale with cost predictability, speed, and governance, that can be deployed anywhere. Businesses that can harness this power, win.

IBM is proud to announce the general availability of IBM Netezza Performance Server as a fully managed service (NPSaaS) on AWS. NPSaaS is IBM’s cloud-native enterprise data warehouse designed to operationalize business analytics and AI workloads, making data unified, accessible, and scalable anywhere. With new support for open formats such as Parquet and Apache Iceberg, and integration with IBM’s watsonx.data lakehouse, Netezza empowers data engineers, data scientists, and data analysts to run complex workloads without additional ETL or data movement. Netezza uses AI-infused elastic scaling to enable workload efficiency and cost predictability in the cloud, at a massive enterprise scale. Existing Netezza appliance customers can enjoy risk-free, frictionless upgrades, making it easy to modernize at your own pace. NPSaaS will be available in USA, Canada, Germany, South Korea and Japan.

“From a cost perspective, IBM Netezza SaaS on AWS really nailed the economics of a cloud data warehouse. From an effort perspective, the migration was straight forward lift and shift- allowing us to easily migrate data and re-direct our BI layer without making any changes to our reports or dashboards!  Next, we will explore the options available to us as we move in the direction of governance and metadata that is along the lines of a lakehouse, with watsonx.data. and Netezza on AWS integration.” – Karen Loose, Business Intelligence Development Manager, Conestoga Wood Specialties Corporation.

Better together: Netezza Performance Server and AWS

In May 2022, IBM officially announced its strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver IBM SaaS products in the AWS marketplace. This partnership now gives Netezza customers the opportunity to get started with an enterprise data warehouse on AWS infrastructure combined with the native AWS experience and integration of AWS services out of the box.

IBM is committed to giving customers the ability to run analytics in their cloud of choice. AWS marks the second cloud provider for Netezza customers to run analytics fully managed in the cloud. NPSaaS has been available on Microsoft Azure since 2021, and is discoverable on the Azure Marketplace.

Why Netezza Performance Server as a fully managed service on AWS Cloud?

With Netezza Performance Server as a fully managed service on AWS, we’re introducing a host of new capabilities:

AI infused elastic scaling

Netezza’s cloud elastic computing also enables granular elastic pricing—you can scale up and down while paying for only what you use, no t-shirt sizes. Our innovative built-in AI workload analysis model predicts future scaling needs and enables cost predictability in the cloud. The AI model output allows the customer to make fact-based workload deployment and scaling decisions.

Single view of your analytics and AI estate

Through optimized integration with IBM’s watsonx.data lakehouse and IBM Knowledge Catalog, run analytics and AI workloads on all your governed data across hybrid cloud from a single point of entry. IBM Knowledge Catalog enforces global policies locally to ensure enterprise compliance and security across your data.

Netezza also supports open file formats such as Parquet to easily share data across your analytics ecosystem. Utilize Apache Iceberg ACID compliant open table format and low-cost object storage to access and securely share large volumes of data with multiple Netezza engines at the same time. Augment Netezza data warehouse with fit-for-purpose query engines such as Presto and Spark to optimize workloads for all data types.

Operationalize AI with governed data

You can build, train, tune, and deploy your own AI models with governed data in Netezza.

Netezza also brings analytics to your data with rich built-in analytics and geospatial capabilities. Data scientists and analysts can execute custom machine learning models that predict and score directly inside the database. Netezza supports all major programming languages including but not limited to Python, C/C++, R, Lua, and Java.

Unparalleled performance for your mission critical data in the cloud

Netezza’s patented massively parallel processing technology enables faster queries, and analytics workloads that can support thousands of concurrent users for real-time insights.

Netezza with watsonx.data: Tying it all together

Netezza and watsonx.data combine to give customers the ability to seamlessly modernize their existing analytics environment, eliminate data silos, and optimize their analytics and AI workloads to suit their cost and performance needs.

1. Modernize the warehouse: Customers on a journey to cloud or looking to upgrade from their existing on-premises analytics appliance to the cloud can seamlessly transfer data and workloads to Netezza SaaS.
2. Securely share warehouse data with the data lake: Customers can securely share data from their Netezza SaaS instance with their watsonx.data instance using the first-party integration capabilities in the product. This allows customers to run fit-for-purpose engines for their workload and get a singular view of their analytics estate.
3. Promote data lake data to the warehouse: watsonx.data customers can promote their curated data into Netezza to take advantage of the performance, resiliency, and scalability of the Netezza engine for real-time insights.
4. Cost-optimize cloud data warehouse storage: Customers can take advantage of inexpensive and highly reliable object storage.

Take the Netezza test drive

Netezza is often imitated, but it has never been equaled. Experience AI infused elastic scaling, unified analytics, and high performance with a sophisticated cloud data warehouse. Deploy the same Netezza on AWS with load and go simplicity, zero operational overhead, no indexing, no tuning with automated maintenance.

For existing customers, IBM takes the guesswork out of deploying Netezza to AWS with a single nz_migrate command.