MARSHFIELD, WI – The Marshfield Clinic, a multi-specialty physician practice with 45 locations across Wisconsin, has deployed technology to address the research database and computation needs of the Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation.

Marshfield tapped the Marlborough, Mass.-based Netezza Corp. for its Twin Fin appliance.

"We began working with Netezza more than a year ago," said Justin Starren, MD, director of biomedical informatics at Marshfield. "Netezza was able to provide a solution that could scale with our growing data needs and remain cost-effective without sacrificing performance. The fact that the new Netezza TwinFin supports both conventional database access and also parallel scientific computation was the factor that led us to choose the new architecture."

"With the latest spotlight and investment in the healthcare industry, it is even more critical to implement the most efficient processes and continue to improve on patient care," said Jim Baum, president and CEO at Netezza. "Our customers, like Marshfield Clinic, have come to expect a level of innovation from Netezza and the TwinFin appliance delivers the performance and scalability required to fulfill their growth strategy."

The Netezza data warehouse appliance is designed to analyze petabytes of detailed data faster than existing data warehouse options and at a much lower total cost of ownership, Baum said. It stores, filters and processes terabytes of records within a single unit, analyzing only the relevant information for each query, he said.

Netezza has placed the CPU power next to the data, allowing its appliances to speed through processes that would occupy most data warehouse systems for hours, or even days, thereby enabling what Baum called "dramatic increases in productivity" across an organization.