| | JULY 20169CIOReviewsources, and the ever-present desire to gain new insights to drive our business. In the big data world this is referred to as Volume, Variety, and Velocity.Actually one of the key drivers of the analytics phenomenon is the fact that we are creating and keeping more data today than ever before. Just a few years ago, IBM research published a rather startling fact; it states we as a society are creating 2.5 quintillion bytes or 2.5 exabytes of data every day. The EMC Digital Universe study with research and analysis by IDC, projectsa doubling of our digital universe every two years to a whopping 44 zettabytes or 44 trillion gigabytes by 2020containing as many digital bits as there are stars in the universe. This may sound completely overwhelming, but this is where the opportunity exists for organizations to uncover new business insights. The data we create, the data we keep, the data we manage, becomes the informational basis to answer all of the "what if" questions. It also tells us what data we are not capturing and need to capture to be more successful and more competitive in the market today. Answering the "what if" moves an organization from the business intelligence models that tell us:· How we performed last quarter?· How many units we sold?· Identifying situational problemsTo transforming an organization into the data science of analysis, looking at predictive opportunities, business modeling and scenario analysis. Beyond the Basics This is the beauty of where our industry is headed, and there are storage platforms specifically designed to help propel the answer to the "what if", be it a PCI NVMe rack-scale flash storage, or a data lake storage solutions purpose built to support multiple protocols allowing for in place analytics. I know there is a lot of discussion and "hype" about just using a free distro of Hadoop with a cluster of "pizza boxes" containing both storage and compute. While this may sound appealing, because of its low cost, repurposing of old or aging equipment and freeone really needs to consider if this is a "go forward" infrastructure to bet the business on. I certainly believe using a small startup cluster of "pizza boxes" is quite all right, at a very small scalebut where I believe this breaks down is when it begins to grow out of control and into the 200, 300, 500, 1000TB range. The manageability becomes a problem; the "low-cost" and "free" doesn't exist anymore, OPEX may spike just keeping the racks of "pizza boxes" and then there is the question of scale. In this scenario storage and compute scale together, there is not opportunity to scale compute separate from storage.The reality is you may not be getting the valuable, actionable information you desired from the outset. My challenge to you, as CIOs of your organizations, is to not approach this with a "budget" in mind, or by making low level technology decisions but approach this with a desired business outcome in mind, and clearly identify the goals you intend to achieve with this new "platform". IT is changing, we need to pivot, and begin to look at our roles as supporting actors in the big picture of the business and not "just the IT guy". Every CIO I speak to is either exploring or deploying an analytics farm in the data centerDavid A Chapa
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