IBM Announces New Innovations To Tackle Big Data

IBM has announced new technologies designed to help companies and governments tackle Big Data by making it simpler, faster and more economical to analyse massive amounts of data. New data acceleration innovation results in as much as 25 times faster reporting and analytics.

As organisations grapple with a flood of structured and unstructured data generated by computers, mobile devices, sensors and social networks, they’re under unprecedented pressure to analyse much more data at faster speeds and at lower costs to help deepen customer relationships, prevent threat and fraud, and identify new revenue opportunities.

This recent announcement which represents the work of hundreds of IBM developers and researchers in labs around the world, includes an innovation called “BLU Acceleration,” which combines a number of techniques to dramatically improve analytical performance and simplify administration.

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Also announced is the new IBM PureData System for Hadoop, designed to make it easier and faster to deploy Hadoop in the enterprise. Hadoop is the game-changing open-source software used to organise and analyse vast amounts of structured and unstructured data, such as posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, online transaction records, and cell phone location data.

The new system can reduce from weeks to minutes the ramp-up time organisations need to adopt enterprise-class Hadoop technology with powerful, easy-to-use analytic tools and visualisation for both business analysts and data scientists. In addition, it provides enhanced Big Data tools for monitoring, development and integration with many more enterprise systems.

“Big Data is about using all data in context at the point of impact,” said Jaskiran Bhatia, Country Manager, Information Management IBM India/ South Asia. “With the innovations we are delivering, now every organisation can realise value quickly by leveraging existing skills as well as adopt new capabilities for speed and exploration to improve business outcomes.”

BLU Acceleration enables users to have much faster access to key information, leading to better decision-making. The software extends the capabilities of traditional in-memory systems – which allows data to be loaded into Random Access Memory instead of hard disks for faster performance – by providing in-memory performance even when data sets exceed the size of the memory. During testing, some queries in a typical analytics workload were more than 1000 times faster when using the combined innovations of BLU Acceleration.

Innovations in BLU Acceleration include “data skipping,” which allows the ability to skip over data that doesn’t need to be analysed, such as duplicate information; the ability to analyse data in parallel across different processors; and greater ability to analyse data transparently to the application, without the need to develop a separate layer of data modeling. Another advance in BLU Acceleration is called “actionable compression,” where data no longer has to be decompressed to be analysed.

The new offerings expand the portfolio of Big Data technologies and solutions, spanning software, services, research and hardware. The IBM Big Data platform combines traditional data warehouse technologies with new Big Data techniques, such as Hadoop, stream computing, data exploration, analytics and enterprise integration, to create an integrated solution to address these critical needs.

IBM PureData System for Hadoop is the next step forward in IBM’s overall strategy to deliver a family of systems with built-in expertise that leverages its decades of experience reducing the cost and complexity associated with information technology. This new system integrates IBM InfoSphere BigInsights, which allows companies of all sizes to cost-effectively manage and analyse data and add administrative, workflow, provisioning and security features, along with best-in-class analytical capabilities from IBM Research.

The announcement also includes the following new versions of IBMs Big Data solutions:

• A new version of InfoSphere BigInsights, IBM’s enterprise-ready Hadoop offering, which makes it simpler to develop applications using existing SQL skills, compliance security and high availability features vital for enterprise applications. BigInsights offers three entry points: free download, enterprise software and now an expert integrated system, IBM PureData System for Hadoop.

• A new version of InfoSphere Streams, unique “stream computing” software that enables massive amounts of data in motion to be analysed in real-time, with performance improvements, and simplified application development and deployment.

• A new version of Informix including TimeSeries Acceleration for operational reporting and analytics on smart meter and sensor data.