4

Progress
DataDirect

THOUGHT LEADERSHIPSERIES

FUTURE-PROOF
YOUR BIG DATA
JOURNEY

ParStream
FAST DATA:
THE NEXT
EVOLUTIONARY STEP
IN BIG DATA ANALYTICS

Managing
Big Data:

THE NEXT
GENERATION
OF SOLUTIONS
2014 | JANUARY

THOUGHTLEADERSHIPSERIES | JANUARY 2014

The Making of the

Analytical Enterprise, 2014

MANAGING THE
NEXT GENERATION
OF BIG DATA

SOLUTIONS

databasesthere is still a great deal of

uncertainty and consternation among
corporate and IT leaders as to what role
new data sources will play in business
futures. Still, theres no denying that the
pressure is on organizations to evolve,
as quickly as possible, into data-driven
concerns, basing decisions on information
that was unreachable or unavailable until
recently.

The pressure is on
organizations to evolve,
as quickly as possible, into
data-driven concerns.
To become these analytical enterprises,
decision makers need access to the
power of new-world, nonrelational
technologies, supported by relational
transactional data engines already well
established in enterprises. The challenges
seen in enterprises over the decades
performance, availability, flexibility, and
scalabilitystill remain and are even
growing in intensity.
To be clear, the analytical enterprise
didnt just spring out of nowhere, it sits
on the shoulders of giants. The analytical
enterprise of today is not only dealing with
the new streams of big data seen today, but

also the systems and transactional engines

and analysis tools that have been built
and put to the test through years of work.
In addition, many high-volume sites are
shifting to newer types of solutions, such
as appliances and data virtualization to
move data faster, the Unisphere survey
of 338 data managers shows. (Moving
Data: Charting the Journey From Batch
to Blazing, sponsored by Attunity and
produced by Unisphere Research, a division
of Information Today, Inc.)
To succeed in todays hectic and evershifting global economy, the budding
analytical enterprise needs to have the
following elements:
A strong foundation of trust, ensuring
that all information reaching decision
makers is as reliable, up-to-date, and as
contextually relevant as possible.
An understanding that there is no one
single system or type of platform that
can deliver all the capabilities needed.
There are many technologiessome
decades old, others new on the scene
that will help the organization move
forward.
Technology that is designed around,
and with the close cooperation of,
business end users to best address
what they require to do their job
and make the best decisions.
s
s

Listening to the pundits, you can be

forgiven for thinking that the unstructured,
cloudified, out-of-network data tsunami
is poised to sweep through and shake
enterprises out of their comfortable,
relational worlds. But theres more to the
story than that. Enterprises still, and will
likely continue to, rely on relational
database systems as their transactional
workhorses. These systems continue to
evolve and adapt to todays new data
realities. Many relational database and data
warehouse environments are opening to
unstructured data, running in clouds, and
supporting caches that enable real-time
or near real-timedecision making.
A recent survey of 304 data managers
finds close to two-thirds of respondents
were planning to employ their relational
databases to meet the big data challenge.
In addition, two-fifths of organizations also
rely on archived or historical datafor
initiatives such as data warehousingas
the foundation of their big data efforts.
(2013 Big Data Opportunities Survey,
sponsored by SAP and produced by
Unisphere Research, a division of
Information Today, Inc.)
While all the excitement is currently
focused on new-age solutions that have
surfaced in the past few yearsNoSQL,
NewSQL, cloud, and open source

THOUGHTLEADERSHIPSERIES | JANUARY 2014

Evolving to the analytical enterprise

is not an overnight process, rather its a
step-by-step journey, marked by adopting
and refining the best available data tools
and methodologies available. Here are
six key guidelines for aligning your data
management people and platforms to
successfully complete this transition:
1) The analytical organization is
about the businessnot more, not less.
The business needs to drive the process,
and business and technology teams need
to collaborate to move the enterprise
forward. Remember, many business
leaders now want to compete on analytics,
but often dont understand how to best
make this a reality. Management teams
and centers of excellence provide a way
of elevating the potential of a data-driven
culture while transcending organizational
inertia or turf battles.
2) Measure everything. In an analytical
enterprise, its all about employing data to
measure business progress. An important
output within the analytical enterprise are
key performance indicators that keep track
of the impact of systems and decisions
on critical business requirements, such as
revenue growth, customer churn, product
returns, and employee turnover.
3) Trust is everything. All data
flowing through and deep into the
analytical enterprise must be trustworthy.
This is accomplished by open lines of
communication, as well as redoubled
efforts to achieve data quality and security.
Within the ETL and data warehousing
world, well-established processes have long
been employed to identify, deduplicate,
and clean data before it reaches decision
makers. Part of this collection of best
practices is master data management,
which helps assure that there is a single
gold copy of data that is being accessed
across the enterprise.
4) Open up data management
processes. An analytical enterprise depends
on many existing solutions as well as new
types of technologies that will enhance its
capabilities. For example, both proprietary

and open source approaches, as well as

various data typescan be accommodated
with open interfaces. By standardizing
data and data access across the enterprise,
it will become easier to identify important
data sources, as well as how data can be
converted to information that has business
value. Such standards should encompass
everything from data management tools
and platforms, data models, integration
processes, and security protocols.

Evolving to the analytical

enterprise is a step-by-step
journey, marked by
adopting and refining
the best available data tools
and methodologies available.

5) Move from standalone data silos

to Data as a Service. A rapidly emerging
trend is data virtualization, in which both
data and data management functions are
abstracted into a standardized service
layer that is accessible from across the
enterprise. Decision makers (both in the
business and IT departments) shouldnt
be caught up in trying to wrest data out
of silos, or attempting to learn the ins and
outs of complicated database systems. In
addition, since business users now come
into the enterprise with a range of devices
from smartphones to tablets to PCs
its critical that available information be
delivered through a well-designed and
consistent architecture that separates the
client interface layer from the underlying
back-end systems.
6) Build for growth, in the most
economical way. The analytical enterprise
is a constantly growing organism, and
as its power and capabilities catch on,
more parts of the business will want
to participate. Thus, the volumes and
varieties of data generated and consumed
will grow as well. Database managers need
to be able to quickly and dynamically
provision systems to accommodate fastchanging workloads, as well as keep things
running smoothly on a 24x7 basis.

Often, new resources coming online

offer more economical ways to manage big
data workloads. Analytical enterprises also
are more likely to be taking advantage of
easily swappable commodity components,
such as PC-class processor servers or
blade servers. While it may be expensive
to attempt to bring log files, machinegenerated data, or test data into a
traditional data warehouse and ETL
environment, open source frameworks
such as Hadoop can accommodate these
files at a much lower cost and employ
clustered processing to scale as much
as needed.
Every analytical enterprise will be
different, and there is no single right
solution or approach in terms of
technology to get there. Fully one-third
of 298 data managers surveyed by
Unisphere Research said they have
already put approaches into place
to preprocess massive data stores to
load into existing data warehouses for
analysis. (Big Data, Big Challenges, Big
Opportunities, sponsored by Oracle
and produced by Unisphere Research,
a division of Information Today, Inc.,
in partnership with the Independent
Oracle Users Group)
Its highly likely these data managers
recognize the advantages in integrating
new data types with their relational data
environments. Hadoop is currently the
popular choice among data managers and
analysts for ingesting and processing big
data, but other solutions could come to
the fore within the next few years.
Rather than being on any single
methodology or technology, the analytical
enterprise relies on multiple sources
and multiple strategies, including data
virtualization, data federation, cloud,
master data management, and data
warehousing. Decision makers and
technologists need to be able to change
interfaces and data structures as frequently
as the business requires. A well-designed
analytical enterprise architecture is built
on a strategy which employs the best of
all data solutions both old and new.
n


Joe McKendrick

sponsored content

THOUGHTLEADERSHIPSERIES | JANUARY 2014

Future-Proof
Your Big Data Journey
All new innovative, disruptive industry
shifts (and Big Data is certainly one of
those) promise new opportunities and
competitive advantage. But the reality is
that Big Data is a journey for organizations
and there are fundamental challenges
that they need to be aware of. There are
4 primary areas that require particular
attention:
1. Technology Selection: There
are many technology choices between
NewSQL, NoSQL, Hadoop, and
other alternatives that require an
understanding of how each can bring
value to an organization. It is unlikely
that any single option will solve all your
data problems, so careful planning is
required to choose the right one for the
job. This is especially important with
respect to the qualities of service each
solution provides in terms of security,
auditing, failover, and so forth.
2. Market Consolidation: Just like
with the Database Wars of the 1990s, the
Big Data space will inevitably consolidate
over time to a smaller set of gorilla
vendors. For organizations, that means
risk and disruption as they proceed
through this cycle, possibly having to
abandon initial selections as they migrate
to winners later.
3. Skills Gap: Big Data is a new
technology and there currently is a
shortage of experts who can administer,
manage, and leverage Big Data. These
technologies are maturing but still have
a long way to go to match the kind of
expertise that is easily found in the
relational database world.

4. Standards and Integration:

Organizations have been conditioned
to expect their relational databases will
work with anythingtheir BI tools and
dashboards, their data warehouses, and
their applications. The same isnt true yet
with Big Data. For example, connecting
a BI tool to a NoSQL database can be
one of the hardest things they need to
accomplish, but critical to achieving
value from their Big Data initiative.

Finding the
right tools
to overcome the
4 critical Big Data
challenges
The journey to achieve data-driven
decision-making requires navigating
complexity and scale to interconnect
your existing IT ecosystem to the new
Big Data world. In order to reach the
promised land, executives and IT leaders
must build a strategy to make the smooth
transition to Big Data maturity.
Because of the complexity, the
heterogeneity, and real-time nature
of data, new ecosystems are emerging
outside of existing IT solar systems
to directly address each challenge.
From the NoSQL ecosystem, which
addresses transactional challenges, to
the Hadoop world, which addresses
predictive analysis, these new terrains
create the skills gap, lack of integration,

and investment risk which make a Big

Data planning framework so difficult to
develop and execute.
The Progress DataDirect Connectivity
suite provides the tools set to overcome
the 4 critical Big Data challenges while
ultimately enabling the new Big Data
environments to be integrated into your
existing IT ecosystem. The standardsbased connectivity across the growing list
of Big Data vendors empowers in-house
IT teams to leverage their existing SQL
skills to manage against gaps. At the same
time, the ability to focus development to
one SQL source which connects to many
platforms protects against future market
consolidation and technology selection.
However, the most important benefit of
the flexible DataDirect Connectivity suite
is the ability to integrate your current IT
ecosystem without abandoning previous
investments, strategies, or technologies.
To begin your journey to the Big
Data promised land, start small and
build slowly. Incorporate investments
in the foundational elements that will
integrate new Big Data environments
into your existing IT ecosystem to
future-proof your plan. Continue to
add additional data sources and adjust.
Continuing down this path after making
the appropriate upfront investments will
ensure you realize the promise of Big
Data to achieve data-driven decisionmaking without rethinking your entire
n
IT strategy. 
PROGRESS DATADIRECT
www.datadirect.com

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THOUGHTLEADERSHIPSERIES | JANUARY 2014

Fast Data:

The Next Evolutionary Step in Big Data Analytics

By Jrg Bienert, Co-Founder and CTO, ParStream

Big Data can play a pivotal role in

a business decision-making process,
but traditional database tools lack the
capability to conduct ultra-fast, subsecond real-time analysis. As part of the
next generation of solutions, its time
for Big Data to evolve to Fast Data with
ParStreams Real-time Big Data Analytics
platform. Fast Data is the simultaneous
analysis of historical data and newly
imported data which allow companies to
make real-time information based on the
latest, most relevant information available.
ITS NO LONGER JUST ABOUT
BIG DATA, ORGANIZATIONS
NEED FAST DATA

An analytics database is only as

good or as fast as the database it rides
on. Traditional database technologies
were not designed to manage todays
data volumes. Its no longer the norm
to make queries and wait hours for the
result. Delayed query results are fine if a
business wants to know what happened
yesterday, last week or last month, but
most organizations naturally want to
have real-time information for real-time
decision-making. While new platforms
are being created to address substantial
amounts of data, many of these lack the
capabilities to query and analyze data fast
enough for it to be useful. Slow data can be
debilitating and costly, not just monetarily
but in terms of innovation.
Todays data scientists must analyze
historical data while continuously
importing new data to produce realtime results. This is what we call Fast
Data. In todays business landscape,
companies need an analytics database that
is specifically engineered to deliver both
Big Data and Fast Data, in order to get the
maximum value from the information
they have.

SELECTING A NEXT GENERATION

SOLUTION

Along with the speed of analyzing

data, here are the key considerations

that businesses should be aware of when

selecting a next generation solution for Big
Data analytics:
Find and analyze data from multiple
sources: Todays businesses typically have
data stored across different platforms and
infrastructures. Therefore, the Big Data
analytics tool should have sophisticated
interfaces that can access data across all
data warehouses and be able to analyze
data at its source. It also needs to be able
to run on any type of platform: from
standard infrastructure and single servers
to dedicated server-clusters, virtualized
infrastructure and public clouds.
One platform for everything: Some
Big Data analytics tools require different
systems to monitor, analyze, and produce
reports. This is cumbersome and really
doesnt have to be this way. Everything
from monitoring, analysis and reporting
should all be on one platform and through
one easy-to-navigate interface.
Efficient running costs: Most databases
are expensive to run. Businesses should
consider using commodity hardware and
standard Linux operating systems. The Big
Data analytics provider should hold most
of the data on disks, which frees up the
database memory. That will result in faster
responses with less hardware and reduced
running costs.
Always on: Ensure that the Big Data
analytics tool can carry on even if theres
a network outage or outages on multiple
nodes. When a node re-joins a cluster,
the Big Data analytics tool should
automatically re-synchronize the data
with it.
Simple administration: The Big Data
analytics tool should give decision makers
the most important information at-a-glance.
All the vital metrics should be available in
a simple graphical interface. Performance
analysis, metadata inspection, and general

cluster health should all be

found on a single screen.
MAKING SENSE
OF IT ALL

Most organizations will derive value

by gaining insights from analyzing large
amounts of semi-structured data (a data
mix from structured and unstructured
sources). Once analytics have been run
against raw data, companies do need
to obviously make sense of everything.
Sophisticated algorithms and analytical
tools have brought the companies this far
but they dont constitute a competitive
advantage if no actions are taken. The
ParStream Real-time Big Data Analytics
platform can provide businesses with easy
to understand actionable information.
Companies can view custom dashboards
and data visualizations and create ad hoc
reports on billions of rows of real-time
data. It makes it easy for companies to pull
critical information and have it presented
in a way which is relevant and useful.
For deeper insights, users can typically
filter through variables and drill-down
to more granular details. This empowers
users with up-to-the-second information
for decision-making based on the most
comprehensive and relevant data possible

THE FAST DATA DIFFERENCE

Experts have estimated that the world

today possesses about 1.8 zettabytes of
data. Its also predicted that this amount
of data is going to increase by 50 percent
year-over-year. ParStreams Real-time Big
Data Analytics Platform is highly scalable
in order to help companies adapt to the
data volumes of tomorrow. ParStream
enables businesses to harness the value
of Fast Data, empowering them with
ultra-fast time-to-insights and tools for
better decision-making to stay ahead
of the competition and take the lead in
innovation. n

PARSTREAM www.parstream.com