Sweating your Netezza Asset
First instincts when a vendor announces end of life support for a platform are 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.
This is the reality for a lot of businesses still running legacy Netezza systems including Twinfins, Stripers and Makos. To date, there has been much talk about migrating from these systems to something else, usually in the Cloud. There are, however, many business units that are happy to stay on their beloved Netezza system. They still see a lot of value in using Netezza and are frustrated by the constant pressure to turn off a system that continues to perform.
Infrastructure managers continually invest in new technology for many reasons. High on the list are efficiency improvements, future proofing, scalability and long-term cost savings. There is the perception that moving everything to the Cloud offers savings and performance improvements, and consolidating platforms can reduce the cost of maintenance and support. It all sounds like good economic sense.
In our experience, though, the reality can be very different. We hear regularly how the costs of moving away from Netezza to a new Cloud platform has proved very costly and hasn’t resulted in performance gains. One of our clients is seeing a tenfold increase in their database expenditure after the move. One of the main reasons is that the Cloud performance is inferior to Netezza, so they have had to throw extra compute resources to get the same performance. Another is that the migration effort was far more complicated than anticipated, resulting in massive budget blowouts.
We’ve heard a lot recently about bucking the trend, and sweating your assets, which means better utilising systems that are already in place and spending low extra or marginal costs to exploit better what's been built and spent already.
Netezza is an excellent example of an asset that can be sweated for many years to come. Even though IBM is no longer supporting legacy Netezza appliances, and IT Infrastructure Managers will be gunning to migrate to something that is supported by IBM or another vendor, Smart Associates is helping numerous large companies to keep using that asset with their afterlife support service.
Migrating off Netezza to the Cloud is a hugely expensive exercise. Migration costs aside, it is going to cost, conservatively, $500,000 a year for the next five years, or $2,500,000. You can call this Opex but it’s really just capital expenditure spread over 5 years. For most customers, their Netezza appliance is seven plus years old. It’s a capital investment that has long been depreciated so has zero value on the books. The money has already been spent and all it is costing is some data centre and running costs, plus an afterlife support contract. It makes perfect sense to run it as long as you can if you are getting value from it.
Think of it like a classic car. There are still parts available and expertise to keep it running in tiptop condition, so why burn money on a new vehicle when you still want to drive the old one?
Finally, what about customers running Netezza Performance Server on Cloud Pak for Data, including Hammerheads? These companies will be feeling the pinch as their support costs skyrocket. The cost of IBM maintenance increases significantly each year and for an older Netezza system could even exceed what it cost to install it in the first place. Moving to the Cloud, however, isn’t a silver bullet for this as we explained earlier. The good news for them is that we now offer CP4D support at the fraction of the cost of IBM. Watch out for more information on this, but in the meantime if you want more information, give us a shout.