EMC are jumping on the Data Lake bandwagon, today announcing the new Federation Business Data Lake.
Combining storage and Big Data technologies from the company’s own Information Infrastructure, Pivotal, and VMware, the introduction of the data lake signals a move by EMC to give customers the power to leverage Big Data in a different way.
Data is becoming ‘big’ thanks to data generated from traditional applications, modern applications, sensors and intelligent devices along with masses of new public data such as social media feeds.
The ability to capture and process this data is now possible thanks to the rise of inexpensive storage and limitless compute, along with the invention of new technologies that enable real-time analysis and a direct connection to action through new applications and products.
These storage and analytics technologies, along with the massive data sets comprise the Business Data Lake.
There has been plenty of articles and opinions on the great traditional warehouse vs. data lake debate. While Gartner has in the past warned of the fallacy of the data lake, EMC believe that it fills a critical business gap.
Comprised of both structured and unstructured data from a wide variety of sources, the data lake employs analytics which are focused on building models to predict the future. Companies with successful Data Lakes are leveraging the data and predictive models to build new products, applications and business models to redefine their industry.
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But with all the promises that a data lake may yield, many businesses have been stuck with the complexity of actually building one. The complexity of deploying and configuring the right analytics platform, finding the right corresponding storage for each analytics use case, loading the data with the right access rights – all of these factors combine to make the deployment of a data lake not that easy of a task.
EMC, however, claim they can dispel all the hardships involved with data lake deployment. The new Federation Business Data Lake has at its core products from the EMC Federation of Companies, EMC Information Infrastructure, Pivotal and VMware, meeting critical functional needs – Store, Analyze, Surface and Act.
The analytics layer is completely virtualised with VMware running on Vblocks with predefined analytics use cases and automated provisioning and configuration. EMC Isilon provides the Data Lake Storage Foundation, delivering balance of capacity and performance.
The analytics layer is comprised of the Pivotal Big Data Suite, including PivotalHD, featuring the SQL-on-Hadoop engine, HAWQ. Pivotal Big Data Suite provides enterprise-class SQL, which allows for seamless integration and interoperability with top analytics platforms such as SAS, Tableau and others, over data stored in Hadoop.
EMC is also delivering two additional Business Data Lakes to enable integration with customer choice of Hadoop distribution including Cloudera and Hortonworks, along with any future Open Data Platform-based Hadoop distribution.
A full suite of services is also included for those at varying stages of their Data Lake journey. EMC Technology Onboarding Service is for those ready to deploy a Data Lake; EMC Proof of Value Service for those looking for help implementing the latest big data analytic and rapid application development tools; EMC Big Data Vision Workshop for those who remain undecided about how to incorporate Big Data into their strategy; and Education Services which provides training and certification.
Said to be deployed in as little as seven days, the Federation Business Data Lake will be available from April 2015.
