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The big data technology landscape is varied and vast – and a new report from Forrester examines the key strands, with non-relational databases taking the bulk of the honours.

The report, claimed to be a first of its kind from the analyst firm titled Big Data Management Solutions Forecast 2016 to 2021, argues NoSQL and Hadoop will see the biggest growth during the five year period, with the markets growing 25.0% and 32.9% per year respectively. The analysts also claim that the big data technology space will grow at three times the rate of the overall technology market.

Forrester defines big data technology in six buckets; enterprise data warehousing, NoSQL, Hdaoop, big data integration, data virtualisation, and in-memory data fabric. The latter, a product which usually offers data, compute and service grids as well as an in-memory database, is predicted to grow at 29.2% annually over the coming five years.

Usage varies by industry, but the report notes that while telecommunications, professional services, finance and government are the largest users of these technologies now, the pharmaceutical, transport and primary production industries will be the quickest growing. Almost 40% of firms polled by Forrester say they are implementing and expanding their big data technology adoption, with another 30% planning to up their usage in the next 12 months.

One industry case study which utilises Hadoop in particular is Trulia, an online residential marketplace. On a given day, Trulia would crunch more than a terabyte of data, and cross reference it with a couple of petabytes of existing data to give their users the most accurate information possible.

With regards to NoSQL, a report from Gartner released in April this year around database management systems (DBMS) argued that for the five leaders – Basho, Couchbase, Datastax, MarkLogic and MongoDB – there was “still not much to write home about” in terms of revenue compared to the relational database behemoths.

The vendors will tell a different story, however. Couchbase, for instance, concluded a $30 million series F funding round back in March, with CEO Bob Wiederhold telling this publication that an IPO was not too far away. Yet the overall theme, according to both Gartner and Forrester, is that change is coming – it is just taking a while to get there.

“The complexity and richness of data is changing, along with exploding data volume and velocity. Unstructured data, such as text, tweets, graphs, and video, is an increasingly important source of information,” wrote Jennifer Adams, Forrester senior forecast analyst in a blog post. “Not surprisingly, we expect non-relational databases to be the fastest growing sector within big data management solutions.”

The Internet of Things is clearly many things: data collection and analytics, wearables, Smart Grids and Smart Cities, the Industrial Internet, and more. Cool platforms like Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Intel’s Galileo and Edison, and a diverse world of sensors are making the IoT a great toy box for developers in all these areas.
In this Power Panel at @ThingsExpo, moderated by Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff, panelists discussed what things are the most important, which will have the most profound effect on the world, and what should we expect to see over the next couple of years.

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Amazon has gradually rolled out parts of its IoT offerings, but these are just the tip of the iceberg. In addition to optimizing their backend AWS offerings, Amazon is laying the ground work to be a major force in IoT – especially in the connected home and office.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Chris Kocher, founder and managing director of Grey Heron, explained how Amazon is extending its reach to become a major force in IoT by building on its dominant cloud IoT platform, its Dash Button strategy, Replenishment Services, the Echo/Alexa voice recognition control platform, strategic investments of its Alexa Venture Fund, strategic partnerships with 30+ major consumer package goods companies and the 50-60 million current Prime customers.
If you are developing products, services or platforms for IoT, you don’t want to miss this session. Amazon does not just want to dominate the backend cloud storage, compute and analysis capabilities for IoT data. This is not an incremental, small potatoes effort. It will use its usual low-cost, market share grabbing approach to stake out a large chunk of the IoT market, especially in the Connected Home and office. This will have significant impacts on Google, Apple, ATT, Comcast and other major and minor IoT players.

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Large enterprises today are juggling an enormous variety of network equipment. Business users are asking for specific network throughput guarantees when it comes to their critical applications, legal departments require compliance with mandated regulatory frameworks, and operations are asked to do more with shrinking budgets. All these requirements do not easily align with existing network architectures; hence, network operators are continuously faced with a slew of granular parameter change requests, trying to meet ongoing network requirement changes without having the proper tools in place.

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Canadian nonprofit SOCAN faced digital disruption and fought back by adopting storage innovation that allows for faster responses to end-user needs and opens the door to new business opportunities.
The next BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer digital business transformation case study examines how Canadian nonprofit SOCAN faced digital disruption and fought back with a successful storage modernizing journey. We’ll learn how adopting storage innovation allows for faster responses to end-user needs and opens the door to new business opportunities.

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What are the new priorities for the connected business? First: businesses need to think differently about the types of connections they will need to make – these span well beyond the traditional app to app into more modern forms of integration including SaaS integrations, mobile integrations, APIs, device integration and Big Data integration. It’s important these are unified together vs. doing them all piecemeal. Second, these types of connections need to be simple to design, adapt and configure. Plus, with the proliferation of IoT, there is an explosion in the number of devices requiring interconnection – both in terms of asset monitoring and spatial analytics.

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“You have a memory like an elephant,” is truly a compliment. Researchers document all kinds of remarkable examples of the recall power of elephants, and this is credited with their ability to survive harsh environments as noted in this Scientific American article http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/elephants-never-forget/.
Our human memory also helps us learn from past experiences and mistakes, avoid recognizable hazards and keep track of our very busy lives. Our memories for the most part have served us well, but the same might not always be said about digital memory in an always connected, real-time world.

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Monitoring of Docker environments is challenging. Why? Because each container typically runs a single process, has its own environment, utilizes virtual networks, or has various methods of managing storage. Traditional monitoring solutions take metrics from each server and applications they run. These servers and applications running on them are typically very static, with very long uptimes. Docker deployments are different: a set of containers may run many applications, all sharing the resources of one or more underlying hosts. It’s not uncommon for Docker servers to run thousands of short-term containers (e.g., for batch jobs) while a set of permanent services runs in parallel. Traditional monitoring tools not used to such dynamic environments are not suited for such deployments. On the other hand, some modern monitoring solutions (e.g. SPM from Sematext) were built with such dynamic systems in mind and even have out of the box reporting for docker monitoring. Moreover, container resource sharing calls for stricter enforcement of resource usage limits, an additional issue you must watch carefully. To make appropriate adjustments for resource quotas you need good visibility into any limits containers have reached or errors they have caused. We recommend using alerts according to defined limits; this way you can adjust limits or resource usage even before errors start happening.

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The next generation of platforms is here with options in both cloud and on premises hyperconverged infrastructure. How do real people in today’s business world make the correct choices on where to move?
As IT departments look to move beyond traditional virtualization into cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platforms, they have a lot to consider. There are many types of organizations with different IT needs and it is important to determine whether those needs align more cloud or HCI. Before I dig into the differences, let me go over the similarities.

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