SURENDRA PULAGAM: Netezza system

A Netezza system consists of multiple hardware and software components working together to provide performance and reliability. The NPS models include configurations with one or more hardware racks. Within each rack are numerous components that work together to provide the asymmetric massively parallel processing of the NPS architecture. The key hardware components within an NPS include the following:
􀁘 NPS Host
􀁘 Snippet Processing Units
􀁘 Snippet Processing Arrays

NPS Host

The NPS host, located within the NPS rack, controls and coordinates the activity of the NPS. It performs query optimization; controls table and database operations; consolidates and returns query results; and monitors the NPS system components to detect and report problems.

Snippet Processing Units

The Snippet Processing Unit (SPU) is the basic unit of processing and storage in the NPS.Each SPU is basically a standalone microcomputer, with a CPU, logic processors, memory,and disk storage.The SPU is an intelligent disk storage device, as it has logic to quickly search for the correct information and to return only the matching results of the portions of the data that are saved on its disk.An NPS system has many SPUs: up to 56,User database tables are distributed across all of the SPUs to allow for the parallel query processing.
Each SPU is responsible for managing a portion of your database and tables (called a primary partition), as well as for maintaining a copy of another SPU’s primary partition (called a mirror partition). If an SPU should fail, the mirror partition is used to create a new primary partition on a standby SPU within the system, which will then take the place of the failed SPU.

Snippet Processing Arrays

Snippet Processing Arrays (SPAs) are racks within the NPS system that contain up to 14 SPUs and have the power supplies, fans, and communication fabric that allows the SPUs to communicate with each other and with the NPS host. NPS systems contain at least two SPAs. If you add SPAs to the system to increase the number of SPUs, the SPAs are added in pairs. For each pair of SPAs, one of the 28 SPUs takes the role of a hot standby, ready to take the place of a failed SPU within the system.