Back when on-premise data centers were commonplace, IBM’s Netezza was an industry-leading data warehouse solution. To differentiate itself from the competition, the Netezza platform used a specialized type of hardware called field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that offered hardware acceleration for data processing tasks, making it one of the fastest data warehousing solutions on the market.
As public and private cloud platforms grew in popularity, Netezza’s star began to fade and it had trouble attracting users. These specialized FPGA devices were difficult to configure and manage, especially in massive datacenter environments like AWS. This led to IBM discontinuing the Netezza platform, making it an end of life product in 2019.
Benefits of migrating from Netezza to Amazon Redshift
With Netezza in the EOL stage, it’s time for your business to start looking at alternative options. One such option is AWS, a mixed public/private cloud platform that offers generalized cloud computing resources, including data warehousing.
Compared to Netezza, AWS offers many new features to simplify data management and maximize your ability to extract insights. The AWS platform has a dedicated data warehousing solution called Amazon Redshift, offering numerous data migration, management, analytics and third-party integration tools:
Amazon RDS and Trianz Evove – The Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) provides a modern cloud-native relational database hosting solution, compatible with Amazon Aurora, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle DB and SQL Server.
When migrating from Netezza to AWS, you can take advantage of the AWS Database Migration Service (DMS). Trianz also offers a proprietary ETL tool called Evove, whose functions are similar to Amazon DMS, streamlining the migration process from Netezza to AWS.
First and third-party analytics tools – The Amazon Redshift platform offers a range of analytics services based on open-source data formats that integrate well with one another. When you host your database on the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), you can leverage platform-native functionality through tools like Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR and Amazon SageMaker.
Amazon S3 also offers seamless integration with Trianz data warehousing and analytics partners, like Tableau, ServiceNow and Snowflake. It allows you to extend the functionality and capabilities of your data warehouse, leveraging best-of-breed data analytics, IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations management (ITOM) tools.
Undertaking a migration from Netezza to Redshift
When migrating to a new data warehousing platform, you need to be wary of architectural differences that may cause incompatibility. The main difference to be aware of is Netezza SQL, a proprietary SQL fork built by Netezza.
Netezza SQL
Netezza uses a fork of MySQL called Netezza SQL to link database processing workloads to their dedicated FPGA hardware units. These SQL language differences must be remediated before you can migrate your data to AWS Redshift.
Trianz has built a dedicated extract, transform, load (ETL) tool for this purpose, called Evove. During the preassessment phase, Evove will analyze your Netezza database to identify potential migration problems. This could include data definition language (DDL) discrepancies, incompatible SQL querying templates and redundant database information that can be omitted during translation to your new platform. The lean approach to data migration with Evove means you can save money, both during and after the migration process is complete.
Migrate from Netezza to AWS with Trianz
Trianz is a leading data warehousing consulting firm with decades of experience in helping our clients migrate from their legacy data management solutions.
After a thorough testing process, our data warehousing team found that around 95% of legacy Netezza DDL, SQL and stored procedures can be automatically converted for use on AWS. For the remaining, we will work with you to rewrite and transfer configurations and datasets to your new data warehouse, offering a seamless migration experience.
Talk to us about your migration challenges today!
