First instinct when a vendor announces end of life support for a platform is to look at the latest technology offering with a natural assumption being that it will be faster, simpler and cheaper. The reality, however, is that often the current system is performing satisfactorily across all measures and moving off it will result in a lot of pain. What can you do?

The Netezza Mako N3001-## range reaches end of OEM support in 12 months. Here's a roundup of the products and services we offer to not only extend the life of your Mako but also to drastically reduce the overhead of managing the next generation of Netezza, whether on-premises, or in the Cloud.

When upgrading your Netezza system to IBM® Netezza® Performance Server for Cloud Pak® for Data you will want to minimize system downtime. Read how Smart Management Frameworks' Smart Database Replication feature can reduce this to virtually zero.

Netezza Performance Server version 11.2.2 now includes Replication Services. Although at first glance this sounds very similar to what our Smart Database Replication product also does, in fact there are many points of differentiation between the two offerings that customers should be aware of before deciding which is the best approach for them. Let’s explore some of these.

IBM’s Netezza Performance Server systems are incredibly fault tolerant and are known to require far less effort to administer than a traditional RDBMS. This can, however, lead to a false sense of security, and so when DBA resourcing levels are reviewed, some businesses will attempt to reduce costs by handing over the day to day running of Netezza to a non-specialist team. But is this a good idea?

In this blog we’ll take a broader look at IBM’s integrated cloud data platform that makes it easy to deploy, scale, manage and stitch together cloud databases with analytics and AI services across IBM Cloud and 3rd party public cloud vendors, underpinned by Red Hat OpenShift.