Over the past decade, cloud platforms have become the foundational standard for data warehousing. As Netezza was built around dedicated hardware acceleration units, the platform was difficult to accommodate for cloud providers. The manual configuration and maintenance of FPGAs created a lot of overheads in these massive datacenter environments, eventually resulting in IBM declaring Netezza an end of life product in 2019.
New data warehousing platforms like Snowflake offer a lot of the same functionality and performance as Netezza, without the need for dedicated FPGA units. If your business is looking to migrate from Netezza to a new data warehousing platform, you can consider Snowflake.
Benefits of migrating to Snowflake
As Netezza is approaching end of life, businesses need alternative platforms to host their data. Cloud-native data warehousing platforms like Snowflake offer several new features to streamline data management.
Scalable performance and reduced maintenance - Legacy platforms like Netezza do not offer elastic storage and scalable performance. This severely bottlenecks the capabilities of your legacy database in the long term as on-premise infrastructures need hardware upgrades and consequently, downtime to maintain ample processing capacity.
Snowflake remediates this issue by taking advantage of cloud-native functionality on AWS, Microsoft Azure and the Google Cloud Platform. This cloud-agnostic approach to data warehousing allows you to pick and choose between providers, balancing functionality with cost to extract as much value as possible from your new data warehouse. All of the above providers offer performance scaling, but Snowflake takes this a step further by providing a managed serverless compute model. They handle the hardware, so you can focus your time on analyzing and extracting insights from your data.
Integrations with third-party data analytics tools – Snowflake offers a wide range of third-party integrations, to maximize the value of your data warehousing endeavors in the cloud. Traditional data warehouses like Netezza lack any native third-party integrations, but the Snowflake platform works well with numerous external applications and tools to extend the capabilities of your data warehouse. p>
Undertaking a migration from Netezza to Snowflake
Before you transition from Netezza to Snowflake, you need to prepare a migration checklist to guide you through the process. And the starting point is to identify the databases, objects and processes that you want to migrate to Snowflake. To help you do this, we have developed our own proprietary extract-transform-load (ETL) tool called Evove. This application will thoroughly analyze your existing Netezza database, identifying the changes needed for full compatibility on the Snowflake platform.
Snowflake automatically manages several data warehousing workloads. While not exhaustive, here are some workloads you don’t need to worry about:
Data distribution – Compute and storage are separate on the Snowflake platform, making data distribution a non-issue.
Disaster recovery – Netezza offers various disaster recovery options, but the majority of these require additional hardware or software. Snowflake leverages cloud-native disaster recovery functionality on AWS, Azure and GCP, automatically securing your data in the cloud.
Streamlined DevOps – The legacy Netezza platform need additional appliances in case you want to develop further and test your databases. Snowflake allows you to leverage the speed of cloud instance generation, creating databases in seconds that can be used for any purpose you desire.
Leverage the power of Snowflake with Trianz
Trianz is a leading data warehousing consulting firm with decades of experience in helping our clients modernize their data infrastructure and management strategies. We have partnered with Snowflake to deliver bleeding-edge cloud data warehousing and can help you migrate from Netezza with our proprietary Evove ETL application. Schedule a consultation with us today!
