Big Data is a widely used term today in the Technology industry, but what does it mean and how do you make use of it? Big Data is the analysis of information flow that is generated in a day-to-day setting by means of users, customers, environment, or really anything intended to be captured and analyzed. The amalgamation of data generated in a standard day can lead to important business decisions, but only if the proper questions are asked and answered.
Who is accessing the data? When, why, and for how long are they staying?
Beginning with these questions can prime the stage for tremendous utilization of existing resources and future planning. The age-old adage, “If it isn’t broke why fix it?” is still very prevalent today, but how can you know what is working flawlessly and what is in disrepair if there is no understanding of how the data flows through your environment? These are only the first questions to be asked and as time goes on there is untold potential for monetization strategies that exist within your existing data.
One example I would like to provide is data analysis crossed with workload performance balancing.
Again, Big Data is the application of existing information in order to make smarter business decisions. Many people ask me, well how can we do that? One example, is understand the trends within your environment and realizing how the data flows. Peak network activity can mean few different things depending on your business. Traffic peaking at 8AM can mean your internal users are all booting up and requesting a vast amount of resources from your applications. Alternatively an apex of traffic at lunch time could mean consumers are accessing your website hoping to make a quick purchase or read an article before they take off or return to work.
Understanding this trend on your infrastructure and resources can allow for the optimization of resources to more effectively serve your users or customers. Leveraging a workload balancer to utilize the SAN over Flash when only read-only operations are needed (think customers accessing a library of static pictures) in comparison utilizing your SAN for when users are utilizing more CPU intensive processes (think calculator or text mining).
It is no small task to effectively optimize computer infrastructure, but with the application of big data your hardware can be better used to meet the needs of your data.
Beyond improving performance of existing pathways, there are additional benefits balancing workloads between different sets of hardware. Wear-and-tear is a consideration to make when deciding where to utilize compute infrastructure. Meaning, you would not want to continuously utilize your flash storage hardware when blades and SANs would do the trick.
Thanks for reading.
-Kyle