In essence, Netezza Skimmer is 1/3 of Netezza's previously smallest appliance, for 1/3 the price.

I.e., Netezza Skimmer has 1 S-blade and 9 disks, vs. 3 S-blades and 24 disks on the Netezza TwinFin 3.

With 1 disk reserved as a hot spare, that boils down to a 1:1:1 ratio among CPU cores, FPGA cores, and 1-terabyte disks on Netezza skimmer. The same could pretty much be said of Netezza TwinFin, the occasional hot-spare disk notwithstanding.

Netezza Skimmer costs $125K.

With 2.8 or so TB of space for user data before compression, that's right in line with the Netezza price point of slightly <$20K/terabyte of user data.

That assumes Netezza's usual 2.25X compression. I forgot to ask when 4X compression was actually being shipped.

I forgot to ask, but it seems obvious that Netezza Skimmer uses identical or substantially similar components to Netezza TwinFin's.

Netezza Skimmer is 7 rack units high.

In place of the SMP hosts on TwinFin Systems, Netezza Skimmer has a host blade.

Netezza (specifically Phil Francisco) mentioned that when Kalido uses Netezza Skimmer for its appliance, there will be an additional host computer, but when it uses TwinFin for the same software, the built-in host will suffice. (Even so, I suspect it might be too strong to say that Skimmer's built-in host computer is underpowered.)

Netezza also suggested that more appliance OEMs are coming down the pike specifically focused on the affordable Skimmer.