As published in IBM Big Data & Analytics Hub
Intersect360 Research studies the opportunities for high performance technologies, including high performance computing areas in science, engineering
and business. CEO Addison Snell (this week’s IBM Big Data and Analytics Hero) shares his insights with us.
What are some of the challenges with getting started with big data and analytics?
With big data, what we see is an expanding opportunity for the application of high performance computing technologies in a wider range of enterprise
applications, some of which are brand new to this ecosystem. The growth, creation and the accessibility of data is stressing those organization’s
ability to manage or gain competitive advantage from that data. In our surveys on big data, users have consistently shown that what they really
need is the ability to scale their environments, whether from a technology perspective or just helping them take their queries, their algorithms,
their applications that they’ve written in-house and find a way to move those from desktops, to servers, to clusters of servers, to large supercomputers—whatever
it takes to move them to that next level of insight.
What impact does big data and analytics have on business today?
We are still in relatively early days of big data and these types of deployments.
People are saying I read about a guy who dug in his backyard and found treasure and I want to dig in my backyard and find treasure. But we’re still
defining what those solutions are, and how they apply to different kinds of organizations.
Sometimes you have an oil company that needs to ingest hundreds of terabytes in a single file. Sometimes you have a genome X company or Biosciences
where you have lots and lots of little files. Those are different types of problems. A financial organization might have a very short life span
of data where the data last for hundreds of seconds before it needs to be transacted on or it’s useless, whereas a pediatric hospital might have
a cat scan of a two-year-old and they need to hold that data for the life of the patient, plus some years. That might be a hundred-plus years that
you need to plan to keep that data active and be able to access it in a reliable way.