Articles about Big Data

Cray is a business best known for its supercomputers, though 10 percent of its revenue in 2012 came from providing storage. But in the world of big data there's often a requirement to match high performance computing with an effective archiving solution and the company is after a slice of that pie.

With Cray's new Tiered Adaptive Storage (TAS) product it offers a complete solution that includes all of the software and hardware, and eliminates the complexities associated with planning, designing and building large-scale storage archives.

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One thing I find ironic in the current controversy over problems with the healthcare.gov insurance sign-up web site is that the people complaining don’t really mean what they are saying. Not only do they have have little to no context for their arguments, they don’t even want the improvements they are demanding. This is not to say nothing is wrong with the site, but few big web projects have perfectly smooth launches. From all the bitching and moaning in the press you’d think this experience is a rarity. But as those who regularly read this column know, more than half of big IT projects don’t work at all. So I’m not surprised that there’s another month of work to be done to meet a deadline 5.5 months in the future.

Yes, the Obama Administration was overly optimistic and didn’t provide enough oversight. Yes, they demanded fundamental changes long after the system design should have been frozen. But a year from now these issues will have been forgotten.

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While Betanews isn't usually a place for political discourse, I'm going against the grain on this one. It's because I strongly believe the real answer to solving our serious gun crime problem in America rests in something most readers on this site tend to embrace: technology. More specifically, what we refer to as Big Data. I fully believe we have a data problem, not a gun problem. While the debate at large focuses on reaching the same end goal, the fingers point at the wrong solution.

Big Data, in my opinion, does have a spot in this debate. While Robert Cringely one month ago wrote why he believed just the opposite, I think we have more than enough examples of where Big Data has been helping more than hurting. If you listened solely to the press conferences politicians hold in Washington, you'd almost come to the conclusion that all the guns used in recent crimes pulled their own triggers. There seems to be a steady forgetfulness that nearly every recent mass tragedy was actually perpetrated by individuals with some form of mental illness. But this doesn't stir the headlines the same way gun debates do, so the topic gets swept to the wayside.

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Consumer Electronics Show is a big crazy event. There is a lot of new technology that might or might not see the light of day a couple of years down the road, and a whole lot more stuff that is rather hum-drum. Walking through millions of square feed of convention seeing thousands of cheap speakers and iPhone cases and over sized TVs can be a numbing waste of time.

That is why I like the side event, Showstoppers, which puts together a pretty good lineup of interesting tech products. While nothing jumped out as much this year as last, these are a few that piqued my interest as having some potential, or were simply interesting.

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As the father of a precocious first grader I can relate somewhat to the children and parents of Newtown. My son Fallon goes to a school with no interior hallways, all exterior doorways, and literally no way to deny access to anyone with a weapon. Making this beautiful school defensible would logically begin with tearing it down. But the school design is more a nod to good weather than it is to bad defensive planning. The best such planning begins not with designing schools as fortresses or filling them with police. It doesn’t start with banning assault weapons, either, though I’m not opposed to that. The best defensive planning starts with identifying people in the community who are a threat to society and to themselves and getting them treatment. And our failure to do this I generally lay at the feet of Ronald Reagan.

I’ve written about Reagan here before. When he died in 2004 I wrote about a mildly dirty joke he told me once over dinner. It showed Reagan as everyman and explained to some extent his popularity. Also in 2004 I wrote a column that shocked many readers as it explained how Reagan’s Department of Justice built brick-by-brick the federal corrections system that it knew would do nothing but hurt America ever since, making worse both crime and poverty all in the name of punishment.

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Earlier this week, as Hurricane Sandy beat the crap out of the Eastern seaboard, I received an email message from lower Manhattan. You may have received this message, too, or one just like it. It felt to me like getting a radiogram from the sinking Titanic. An Internet company was running out of diesel fuel for its generator and would shortly drop off the net. The identity of the company doesn’t matter. What matters is what we can learn from the experience.

The company had weathered power outages before and had four days of diesel fuel stored onsite. Managers felt ready for Sandy. But most of their fuel wasn’t at the generator, it was stored in tanks in the building basement -- a basement that was soon flooded, the transfer pumps destroyed by incoming seawater. It was like a miniature Fukushima Daiichi, not far from Wall Street.

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IT organizations will spend 28 billion bucks on Big Data this year, Gartner says today. Expect $34 billion next year, if the forecast holds true. But big spending surprisingly doesn't much benefit enterprise software vendors. Most of the money goes into adapting what businesses already have, with the trend generating just $4.3 billion in software sales this year.

"Despite the hype, big data is not a distinct, stand-alone market", Mark Beyer, Gartner research vice president, says, "but represents an industrywide market force which must be addressed in products, practices and solution delivery". Biggest spending, some 45 percent a year, goes into content analytics and social network analysis -- that sounds like "data mining" to me. But, hey, analysts make money coining terms and offering consulting services around them.

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Today, Google updated its enterprise search product, upping the number of supported languages to 60, better improving Big Data capabilities, increasing scalability and providing document previews with search results.

"Administrators can easily add content sources from secure storage, cloud services or the public web and social networking sites", Matthew Eichner, general manager of Google enterprise search, says. "GSA 7.0 also provides Google-quality search for SharePoint 2010, making for a more simple and intuitive, all-in-one search experience".

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Targeting enterprise clients, after PureFlex and PureApplication Systems, IBM has introduced the third member in its PureSystems family. Named IBM PureData System, it is purposefully designed for big data cloud appliances by providing data services to various applications.

The new PureData System family is comprised of two major platforms. PureData System for Transactions, which is aimed at improving data management costs, and PureData System for Analytics, which is designed to analyze large volumes of data.

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Maybe it wasn't drool-worthy enough for heaps of fanboys to liveblog, but Leading Cloud CRM provider Salesforce has already rolled out a host of big news at its week-long Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. Some of the news has been in the form of new product unveilings and new partnerships that focus primarily upon expanding Salesforce's social CRM functionality, and growing its business into newer, less-trodden territory.

Some of the news has taken the form of progress updates on Salesforce as a company, and on the state of enterprise cloud business as a whole. Those who are acutely aware of bubble-like investment opportunities where growth is fast but returns on investment are uncertain will want to take note.

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Microsoft is pushing the cloud heavily at this years Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas, and its private cloud offerings are taking center stage. The company announced the general availability of System Center 2012, its private cloud management platform.

Private cloud deployments are exactly what the name entails -- for consumption internally -- and can be hosted either internally or by a third-party provider. System Center's public cloud equivalent is Windows Intune, which launched last March.

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For all the talk about the post-PC era and rise of alternate chip architectures, Intel defies gravity's pull. The microprocessing giant's dominance grows stronger, not lesser, which is strange juxtaposition to analyst predictions about media tablets and smartphones running ARM processors ending the PC's decades-long supremacy.

This week, iSuppli reports that Intel's share of the semiconductor market reached its highest level in a decade, 15.6 percent, largely based on its core chip business. "Intel in 2011 saw its revenue jump by 20.6 percent", Dale Ford, head of iSuppli Electronics and Semiconductor Research, says. "This outpaced every other semiconductor supplier in the Top 20 with the exception of Qualcomm Inc. and ON Semiconductor, both of which also saw exceptionally high levels of growth based on a combination of organic expansion and key acquisitions".

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