From the Editors: Big Data is storage, for now
By SD Times Editorial Board
May 31, 2012 —
(Page 1 of 2)
Ah yes, the Big-Data revolution. To listen to the vendors and the Apache Hadoop faithful, Big Data is the latest and greatest buzzword that will save your company from wasteful spending, ineffective marketing campaigns, and customer bleeding. It’s the best of Business Intelligence, Business Analytics, Data Mining, and a whole lot more, tied up with a ribbon.
But is Big Data really about gleaning all that juicy information from transaction logs, enterprise databases and unstructured data sources? Not quite. Right now, Big Data is mostly about just having a place to put all your data so you can actually perform calculations across it.
And that's why, while Big Data isn't just about Hadoop, we believe that right now, Big Data is mostly about Hadoop. That's because Hadoop is today’s best general solution for cost-effectively storing huge chunks of data and then performing computation across that data.
Yes, there are dozens of companies that will sell you expensive solutions to do just this, but Hadoop is the best way to get in the Big-Data room without spending millions of dollars for the privilege.
So Big Data, step one, is about putting your information into Hadoop. The second step, which is where we expect most data-rich enterprises to be by the end of this year and into 2013, is to begin to actually ask that data questions. That's where analytics tools come into the picture. And as you can see in our Big-Data story this month, that's also where a lot of companies are hoping to make a big impact. But until enterprises get their data into a Hadoop cluster (or any alternative platforms that spring up), all the analytics in the world won't matter: A petabyte of data is just a concept unless you've got a place to put it.
Related Search Term(s): Big Data, Alan Turing
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