The High Capacity Appliance is aimed at companies such as banks, telecoms and other organizations that are amassing ever-increasing amounts of data and want to gain deeper insights from it, whether for competitive advantage, more efficient operations or profit from new lines of business. It will be available in a number of size configurations.

It's the first new Netezza appliance product released since IBM bought the company last September. Netezza positions itself as a more cost-effective and easier-to-install alternative to competing products such as Oracle's Exadata.

Netezza customer Kelley Blue Book is planning to evaluate the new appliance, said Dan Ingle, vice president of analytic insights at the company, which provides information about new and used automobile prices to car shoppers.

KBB's statisticians are currently using a Netezza TwinFin 6 machine along with analytics software from SAS Institute to crunch massive amounts of pricing information, work that is made more complex by the fact that sources for automotive data are "not very standard at all," Ingle said.

The company obtains data about car prices from a wide variety of sources, including "a great deal of auction transactions," he said. But an accurate pricing analysis and forecast for a particular vehicle requires more than simply the year, make and model, he said. Auction sale data may leave out options and other variations a particular car may have that will affect the market price.