With Strata, IBM IOD, and Teradata Partners conferences all occurring this week, it’s not surprising that this is a big week for Hadoop-related announcements. The common thread of announcements is essentially, “We know that Hadoop is not known for performance, but we’re getting better at it, and we’re going to make it look more like SQL.” In essence, Hadoop and SQL worlds are converging, and you’re going to be able to perform interactive BI analytics on it.
The opportunity and challenge of Big Data from new platforms such as Hadoop is that it opens a new range of analytics. On one hand, Big Data analytics have updated and revived programmatic access to data, which happened to be the norm prior to the advent of SQL. There are plenty of scenarios where taking programmatic approaches are far more efficient, such as dealing with time series data or graph analysis to map many-to-many relationships.
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Is the Way to the European Cloud Paved Mainly with Good Intentions?
At the end of last month the EU released its plans for «Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe». But although the document (s) – just like EU commissioner Kroes in this video – do a good job describing in non-technical terms what cloud is and why Europe should care about having a competitive cloud position, it kind of stops there.
Even though it defines three key actions – around Standards, Terms and Public Sector taking a lead role – most described actions consist of softer items such as «promoting trust by coordinating with stakeholders», «identifying best practices,» «promoting partnerships» and «investigating how to make use of other available instruments.» Now of course European cloud computing can benefit from funding reserved for other EU initiatives such as the Connecting Europe Facility and from side initiatives such as the «Opinion on Cloud Computing» published by the Article 29 working party that gives privacy-related contracting guidance, but in general the recent published plan seems to be more about what could and should be, than about what is or will be.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: NoSQL Polyglot Solutions for Big Data
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Brian Clark, Vice President, Field Services, at Objectivity, will review different use-cases and discuss the advantages and benefits of using distributed graph database technologies to more efficiently discover the connections within Big Data to enable real-time searches of multiple types of data across disparate data sources. He will also review the complementary aspect of distributed graph technology with existing and new architectures for improved ROI.
Brian Clark is Vice President, Field Services, at Objectivity, Inc. He has nearly 30 years of software and technology experience, and was one of the early architects of Objectivity/DB. Before joining Objectivity, he worked at Automation Technology Products, providing leading tools in the MCAD market. Prior to that, he was with Project Management Services at International Computers Limited, one of Europe’s leading computer companies at the time.
What Is Driving Cloud Computing?
“In some segments, the price of cloud computing will go up as providers offer higher-end solutions designed to cater to complex enterprise requirements,” observed John A. De Goes, CEO & Founder of Precog, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “However,” De Goes continued, “in most segments, and for any fixed set of features, the price of computing, bandwidth, storage will go down in inflation-adjusted dollars, concurrent with advances in hardware, software, and efficiency, all driven by competitive pressures.”
Cloud Computing Journal: Just having the enterprise data is good. Extracting meaningful information out of this data is priceless. Agree or disagree?
John A. De Goes: Far too many companies pat themselves on the back for having terabytes or petabytes of data. But data has no intrinsic value, and maintaining the infrastructure necessary to capture and warehouse data has very real costs. Data by itself doesn’t give you any competitive advantage. It’s only if you act on that data that you can drive more revenue and secure competitive advantages.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Understanding Cloud Security for Your App
Many articles describe cloud security as a problem. But do you know how security affects you and your application in the cloud?
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Bryan D. Payne, Director of Security Research at Nebula, will open your eyes to the various security concerns in the cloud. Then he’ll go a step further and understand how to translate these concerns into a plan of action for using the cloud to meet your needs, safely. Along the way he’ll explore many of the cloud options that are available today, and how these should fit into your security thinking.
Cloud in the Heartland
I was busy this past week, visiting several small midwestern cities within driving distance of my location in Northern Illinois, talking to businesspeople and academics about cloud computing and big data.
One visit was to the School of Information Technology at Illinois State University, located in Bloomington-Normal. Major companies such as Caterpillar, State Farm, ADM, Hitachi Data Systems, and Discover hire IT grads from ISU, as does John Deere, a couple of hours drive away.
The school has about 500 students enrolled, several thin- and zero-client teaching facilities, strong Internet 2 participation, and a diverse curriculum that embraces languages, frameworks, and specific 1-credit-hour classes in special topics such as iOS and Python.
I heard some frustration about cloudwashing, about innovation being quashed by vendor lock-in, and about the potential of PaaS to reform app development and how it’s taught.
As I ready myself for Cloud Expo in Santa Clara next week, I hope to articulate all my thoughts from this real-world trip – so much of today’s cloud product and service innovation is coming from Silicon Valley, but my impression is that the word has gotten out to the heartland in a big way.
Little Data, Big Data and Very Big Data (VBD) or Big BS?
This is an industry trends and perspective piece about big data and little data, industry adoption and customer deployment.
If you are in any way associated with information technology (IT), business, scientific, media and entertainment computing or related areas, you may have heard big data mentioned. Big data has been a popular buzzword bingo topic and term for a couple of years now. Big data is being used to describe new and emerging along with existing types of applications and information processing tools and techniques.
I routinely hear from different people or groups trying to define what is or is not big data and all too often those are based on a particular product, technology, service or application focus. Thus it should be no surprise that those trying to police what is or is not big data will often do so based on what their interest, sphere of influence, knowledge or experience and jobs depend on.
Cloud Computing: Knowledge Leads to a Change in Thinking
“The basic premise for any central computing system optimized for mass consumption is the 80/20 rule. It can be built only to serve 80% of the needs in an economized and optimized fashion,” noted Chetan Patwardhan, CEO of Stratogent, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “Having said that,” Patwardhan continued, “the so-called cloud economics work only for a certain type of system and is outright prohibitively expensive for most enterprise setups where a typical three-year timeframe cost view is more dependent on human labor than on the infrastructure.”
Cloud Computing Journal: Just having the enterprise data is good. Extracting meaningful information out of this data is priceless. Agree or disagree?
Chetan Patwardhan: Agree 100%. Let’s look at the value creation process: data is nothing but innumerable floating points of reference. The gathering of data is the very first step. Creating useful information out of data is truly a daunting task because it’s not based on the complexity of data, but the simplicity of information that leads to the creation of knowledge. For the CEO of a large company, a dozen key information sets presented in up/down or chart format can create knowledge of how the company is performing. Knowledge leads to a change in thinking, sometimes creating paradigm shifts in how companies approach challenges. Changes in thinking bring about decision making and changes in the behavior of the organization. This chain reaction finally leads to success.
Drilling the Data Wells of the Future
A look at the phenomenon of Human Generated Big Data, the petabytes and exabytes of structured and unstructured data that are currently being generated by users and organizations internationally. Is Big Data going to be another oil rush with a few winners and many losers or will it enrich all of us?
Human generated content is comprised of all the files and e-mails that we create every day, all the presentations, word processing documents, spread sheets, audio files and other documents our employers ask us to produce hour-by-hour. These are the files that take up the vast majority of digital storage space in most organizations — they are kept for significant amounts of time and they have huge amounts of metadata associated with them. Human generated content is huge, and its metadata is even bigger. Metadata is the information about a file: who might have created it, what type of file it is, what folder it is stored in, who has been reading it and who has access to it. The content and metadata together make up human generated big data.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: It’s a Hybrid Polyglot World
Some apps are in the cloud. Some are not. Some components of an app are in the cloud, some components are not. Some code is in Java, some is in Ruby, and some is in Python. Some data is relational. Some is not.
You used the best language, best framework, best database, and best deployment platform for the job. Great. Now what?
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Bill Hodak, Director of Product Marketing at New Relic, will explain how you have to manage it, monitor it, and scale it.
Sounds fun right? Let’s talk!