Chuck's Blog

The Other Side Of Big Data

Yes, I admit it.  I am caught hook, line and sinker on the transformative potential of big data analytics to not only change business, but change the world we live in.  It grows more heady and more intoxicating with every passing week.

Red pill, blue pill ...

But there's another important aspect to the big data discussion that shouldn't be ignored -- and that's the plethora of big data models that aren't entirely based on advanced analytics, but are still strategically important big data applications in their own right.

Our cohorts at Isilon have done a masterful job at accelerating value for our customers in this space, which occasionally tends to get overshadowed by the more flashy topics.

So, in the interests of inclusiveness, I'd thought I'd share with you the other side of the big data story.

HDFS: Coming Soon To An Array Near You

As enterprises around the globe are beginning to exploit the value in their unstructured data, Hadoop is starting to find its way into more enterprise settings.

Enterprise IT buyers are justifiably a demanding lot, which creates plenty of opportunity for IT vendors such as EMC to create products that meet their newer needs.

Such is the case with the new native HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) capabilities from EMC's Isilon group.  

As you'll see, it makes exploiting the power of Hadoop and large unstructured data sets incredibly more efficient and powerful.

And before too long, I suspect other storage vendors will scramble to offer something very similar :)

The Squabble Over Single File Systems

Many of you are endlessly entertained by the back-and-forth bickering between us storage vendors over things like benchmarks. 

Sometimes the disagreement is over how the test was conducted, or the use of "lab queen" configurations that would never be found in a customer environment.

And, occasionally, there's very strong disagreement around comparing two very unlike things using a common standard.   That's what this post is about.

Why should you care? 

In a world of exploding data growth, massive scale and limited resources, how you do things may end up being more important than what you do. 

I believe many IT architects will want to take note of this particular debate, because you'll be seeing ever-more variations of this same theme in the near future.

Big Data, Big Numbers: New SPEC Results From EMC/Isilon

I always warn people -- be careful of what you ask for, you just might get it.

For years, various competitors have heckled EMC that we ought to be more active and participatory with regards to public storage benchmarks.

Today, our Isilon team has released some truly astounding SPEC numbers that should get you thinking about this whole scale-out performance thing in a new way.

There's a lot of juicy insights here -- in addition to the predictable bragging rights -- so let's dig in and see what we've got.

More Isilon Big Data Magic

Now that Isilon is a full member of the EMC storage family, there's a lot to like.

For storage aficionados like me, Isilon's OneFS technology is so simple and effective for storing big data, it's almost magical.

If you're willing to dive into the details, be prepared to potentially unlearn many of your previous assumptions about how things work in a NAS environment.

The way that OneFS does things might be academically interesting in more modest environments -- say, a handful of terabytes. 

But as capacity under management grows to hundreds -- or typically thousands of terabytes, the elegance of the OneFS approach starts to become downright compelling.

Today, Isilon announced a slew of enhancements and upgrades at the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) show.  Not surprising, storage at NAB is all about video and content at scale.

And there's a lot to like with today's announcements.