OCZ has issued a new whitepaper written by Scott Harlin focusing on Big Data applications with flash-based storage. This first part of the whitepaper focuses on providing a better understanding of the Big Data storage opportunity by showing big data use case examples, Big Data analytics as well as benefits of flash-based SSDs for Big Data applications.

While flash-based solid-state storage is already quite popular in the enterprise market, there are certain benefits that can be achieved with Big Data, which represent a large volume of both structured and unstructured data that is too big, moves too fast or exceeds current processing capabilities using traditional software techniques. Usually measuring in tens of terabytes and petabytes, Big Data represents the amount of data a company creates, from conventional or digital sources as well as internal and external to company's enterprise, but does not refer to a specific quantity.

An ability to examine large amounts of data with variety of data types, allows companies to uncover hidden data patterns unknown correlations and other useful information that invariably provide competitive advantages, enable better business decisions and can result in more effective marketing and increased revenue, at least from an analytical perspective.

The part 1 of this whitepaper focuses on key concepts and characteristics associated with Big Data applications as well as a way that flash-based solid-state storage fits into the Big Data model, while the second part will focus on OCZ's enterprise SSD and software solutions that best address Big Data applications and ability to deliver ultra-fast processing of large datasets that enable data-driven analytics.

Big Data is a very important fact and, according to IDC market research, will continue to represent a fast growing multi-bilion dollar worldwide opportunity for the next five years and will transform businesses globally making then Big Data-driven in the process. According to IDC, Big Data market can be spread into three segments, infrastructure, which includes various external storage systems, data center networking infrastructure components and cloud infrastructure services; software, which includes information management software, analytics and discovery software and application software specific to Big Data; as well as services, which include business consultation, integration services, storage services, security services, hardware and software support and many more.

The main difference between data in Big Data is difference between Unstructured Data and Multi-Structured Data. Big Data has been previously hidden due to amount of work required and cost associated in extracting that same data so today, 3Vs of Big Data include, volume, velocity and variability. Big Data is not limite to certain sectors but can be seen in private, government as well as science and research sectors, and some examples include Facebook, Walmart, Amazon, the Big Data Research and Development Initiative announced by the Obama administration in 2012 or the example of The National Security Agency (NSA) which is developing a data center to handle the large amount of information collected by the NSA over the Internet, as well as Large Hadron Collider project or The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).

The benefits of flash-based SSDs for Big Data are quite obvious and offer a significant return on investment (ROI). Since Big Data applications use mixed read and write workloads that require low latency and significant input/output operations per second (IOPS) performance, this makes it a good match for enterprise-class SSDs.

In case you are interested in Big Data applications and benefits of flash-based SSDs for Big Data, you can download the whitepaper below.






Source: OCZ.com.