News

Big Data Cloud Migration Quickens

Vendors scramble to help enterprises move their Big Data analytics to the cloud in an exploding market.

• By David Ramel
• 07/10/2014

The cloud is a perfect fit for Big Data analytics. The hyperscale industry leaders -- Google, Facebook and so on -- have been doing it for many years. But payoffs for smaller enterprises with tighter budgets could be even more important, and there's evidence the trend toward cloud-hosted Big Data is accelerating.

The benefits and business drivers of the migration to the cloud are well-documented and summed up nicely by Oracle Corp. in an article titled "Trends in Cloud Computing: Big Data's New Home":

• Cost reduction
• Reduced overhead
• Rapid provisioning/time to market
• Flexibility/scalability

"Cloud computing provides enterprises cost-effective, flexible access to Big Data's enormous magnitudes of information," Oracle said. "Big Data on the cloud generates vast amounts of on-demand computing resources that comprehend best practice analytics. Both technologies will continue to evolve and congregate in the future."

According to research from Technology Business Research, those technologies will evolve to create a $69 billion private cloud storage market by 2018. To get a piece of that multi-billion-dollar pie, vendors are providing more tools to help enterprises move to the cloud.

As Infochips predicted early last year: "Cloud will become a large part of Big Data deployment -- established by a new cloud ecosystem."

The following moves by industry heavyweights in just the past few weeks show how that ecosystem is shaping up:

• IBM last week added a new Big Data service, IBM Navigator on Cloud, to its IBM Cloud marketplace. With a reported 2.5 billion gigabytes of data being generated every day, IBM said the new Big Data service will help organizations more easily secure, access and manage data content from anywhere and on any device.

  "Using this new service will allow knowledge workers to do their jobs more effectively and collaboratively by synchronizing and making the content they need available on any browser, desktop and mobile device they use every day, and to apply it in the context of key business processes," the company said.

  The new service joined other recent Big Data initiatives by IBM, such as IBM Concert, which offers mobile, cloud-based, Big Data analytics.

• Google last month announced Google Cloud Dataflow, "a fully managed service for creating data pipelines that ingest, transform and analyze data in both batch and streaming modes."

  The new service is a successor to MapReduce, a programming paradigm and associated implementation created by Google that was a core component of the original Hadoop ecoystem that was limited to batch processing and came under increasing criticism as Big Data tools became more sophisticated.

  "Cloud Dataflow makes it easy for you to get actionable insights from your data while lowering operational costs without the hassles of deploying, maintaining or scaling infrastructure," Google said. "You can use Cloud Dataflow for use cases like ETL, batch data processing and streaming analytics, and it will automatically optimize, deploy and manage the code and resources required."

• EMC on Tuesday acquired TwinStrata, a Big Data cloud storage company. The acquisition gives traditional storage EMC access to TwinStrata's CloudArray cloud-integrated storage technology.

  That was just one of a recent spate of moves to help EMC remain competitive in the new world of cloud-based Big Data. For example, when the company announced an upgrade of its VMAX suite of data storage products for big companies, The Wall Street Journal reported: "Facing Pressure From Cloud, EMC Turns Data Storage Into Service."

  The same day, EMC announced "a major upgrade to EMC Isilon OneFS, new Isilon platforms and new solutions that reinforce the industry's first enterprise-grade, scale-out Data Lake." But wait, there's more: EMC also yesterday announced "significant new product releases across its Flash, enterprise storage and Scale-Out NAS portfolios" to help organizations "accelerate their journey to the hybrid cloud."

EMC's plethora of Big Data/cloud announcements makes it clear where the company is placing its bets. Financial site Seeking Alpha outlined the company's strategy in an article titled, "EMC Corporation: Big Data And Cloud Computing Are The Future."

That article was published in March, and judging from EMC's announcements and the bevy of recent moves by other vendors, that future is here.