Capitalizing on Big Data: Analytics with a Purpose
Looking to make it simpler to launch a Big Data project, EMC today unveiled a Federation Business Data Lake, an amalgamation of technologies across multiple EMC business units that sharply reduces the amount of integration work needed to be done by internal IT organizations. The solution is based on products and services from EMC and its VMware and Pivotal subsidiaries.
Aidan O’Brien, senior director of Big Data initiatives at EMC, says EMC has created an extensible wrapper based on a private application programming interface (API) that EMC developed.
On top of that foundation, organizations can extend Federation Business Data Lake to deploy Hadoop, the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment created by Pivotal or any number of analytics applications. Right now, the use of that wrapper technology is limited to a defined set of technologies, but it’s a logical conclusion that EMC will extend the reach of that technology beyond its own product portfolio, says O’Brien.
O’Brien says the existence of the Federation Business Data Lake means that customers now have one number they can call to get support for the Pivotal HD suite, VMware Vblocks software and EMC Isilon storage technologies on which the EMC Federation Business Data Lake is based.
In general, O’Brien says EMC is working toward creating a series of Big Data platforms that can be used not just by data scientists, but just about anyone inside an organization that can benefit from advanced analytics. The issue that EMC is trying to address with its Federation Business Data Lake offering is reducing the amount of time that organizations spend on Big Data implementation issues before realizing any of that value, says O’Brien.
It’s unclear to what degree IT organizations are looking for a more turnkey approach to Big Data platforms versus building one a la carte. But with pressure to make use of more advanced analytics continuing to mount from the business side, chances are more than a few organizations would prefer to spend less time integrating Big Data technologies so they can spend more time actually using them.
