Who cares about Big Data?

Any organization or business strategic enough to know what the future holds for them — if gargantuan amounts of data are carefully and intelligently collected, analysed, optimized and utilized for its benefit and applied to whatever process or operation it is undertaking.

You can just imagine how enterprises lose out in the zettabyte flood, bungling sizeable opportunities from millions upon millions upon millions of billions of bytes existing in the digital universe today. These include missing out on developing massive solutions that would help not only a business’ bottom line but improving the lives of ordinary people as well.

Nothing is as dire as the Philippines where such vast amounts of data are rendered useless due to mismanagement, and worse, ignorance of its potential to improve profit margins, goods and services, and the opportunity to enhance public governance.

Who wouldn’t take Big Data seriously if it can reduce product development time in manufacturing firms by 20-50 percent, or allows cost-efficient management of extended enterprises and global supply chains, according to a McKinsey and Co. report published in 2011.

The same report revealed how companies can obtain data from a never-before-seen perspective to realize incredible benefits for both the company and its customers. Big Data applications, in this regard, can allow companies to view how their products affect customers to the point of how they affect such purchasing factors as grocery budgets. This can provide immense insight on product design, development and deployment.

If such Big Data applications are available to government entities, imagine how they can improve public service—from law enforcement to mass transport systems. That is, if used wisely and ethically, unlike some governments that use it to invade the privacy of its citizens. Easing traffic congestion, enhancing infrastructure, and even crop research and development for the benefit of farmers are only but a few advantages Big Data can give.

This is the area wherein Dell Philippines, among other big IT solution providers, is seeking to capitalize.

The global IT giant has ramped up efforts on the Big Data space as its area of growth in the Philippines, being the biggest enterprise trend in the country due to its incredible potential for productivity and growth.

While remaining mum on these prospects, Dell Philippines country manager Christopher Papa said the company is excited about how the company solutions are being charted for integration in several Big Data initiatives in leading Philippine companies.

“Big Data is where we are going in the Philippines,” Papa tells Tech Buzz in a small group interview recently. “While I can’t name specific initiatives or prospects, I can say that more and more local companies are looking at this direction with Dell in mind.”

From its PowerEdge servers, which offer incredible processor and onboard storage performance that can handle large in-memory and virtualized database transactions through its 6TB memory and fast, low-latency Express Flash Solid State Disks, to Active Fabric switches that intelligently manages network resources through Software-Defined Networking, achieving reliable network access at the fastest speeds. As such, their vision for Future-Ready IT solutions, which sees powerful yet practical IT solutions dominating enterprise data centers, effectively boosts the prospects of efficient Big Data installations in the country.

source: interaksyon.com

Big Data heralds return of the Cray supercomputer

SEATTLE — “Big Data” means big computers, and good news for Cray Inc.

The pioneer of supercomputers in the 1970s stood on the brink of obscurity 20 years ago but is now surging back to prominence. Its shares have almost doubled over the past 12 months.

The explosion of data – measuring weather, traffic, health and countless other areas – coupled with a desire to tease meaning out of it, demands greater computing power than is accessible via standard machines.

“The assumption was that supercomputers were cliche five years ago. People thought, ‘I can run my simulation on my laptop’,” said Barry Bolding, a Cray vice president, at the company’s Seattle headquarters last week. “That may have been true, so long as the data associated wasn’t growing as well. But raw data is being created in exabytes as we sit here. More data means bigger computer, bigger computer means more data.”

Experts estimate that 2.5 exabytes – or 2.5 billion gigabytes – of data are now generated every day, and the world’s capacity to store that data is doubling every 40 months, which all plays to Cray’s strengths.

A basic Cray cabinet costs $500,000 and up and is roughly the size of a refrigerator. Big customers can group 200 or more into massive supercomputers worth hundreds of millions of dollars, such as “Titan” at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Titan, completed by Cray last year, is the world’s third-fastest supercomputer, takes up the size of a basketball court and can perform more than 20,000 trillion calculations a second.

To be sure, most companies will never need that scale, or can process what they need through multiple machines running in tandem on a high-speed network or in the cloud, which for many projects works out cheaper and more power-efficient.

What makes supercomputers different is that they can make a huge number of interconnected calculations at the same time, rather than a consecutive list of unconnected calculations, which makes them good for running complex simulations and mining unrelated data.

For example, weather apps on smartphones are based on vast models run by research agencies on supercomputers. Financial firms can detect online fraud or cybersecurity breaches in seconds rather than days by using supercomputer models, which would take days on standard set-ups.

“Big Data is a new term, but arguably the supercomputer market was the original home of big data, and Cray has been dealing with it forever,” said Steve Conway, an analyst at tech research firm IDC.

Market on fire

The Seattle-based company, with just over 900 employees and a market value of around $940 million, has changed ownership several times but was started in 1972 by Seymour Cray, the “father of supercomputing.”

With a recent resurgence in supercomputers, Cray is garnering Wall Street’s attention. This June, it sold one of its new XC30 supercomputers to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts for $65 million, nabbing a contract from a long-time IBM customer.

That sort of deal is piquing investor interest. Wall Street analysts are expecting revenue of $519 million this year, up 23 percent from 2012, with a gross profit margin around 34 percent. Its shares are up 91 percent over the past 12 months while rival Silicon Graphics International Corp’s are up 90 percent. Cray is now richly valued, with a share price 36 times estimated earnings for the next 12 months, compared with 19 times for SGI.

The global market for computers costing more than $500,000 is on a tear, according to IDC, having more than doubled to $5.6 billion in 2012 from $2.7 billion in 2008.

The whole market for high-performance computing (HPC) – essentially any machine bigger than a desktop used for intense computation – is forecast to grow 7 percent a year through 2017, well ahead of the stagnant business server market.

The U.S. government directly or indirectly accounted for two-thirds of Cray’s revenue last year. But the company is reaching out to new customers interested in big data. Last year it set up a new unit called YarcData – Yarc is Cray backwards – to focus on analyzing huge amounts of information and teasing out unseen patterns in a process known as graph analytics.

“Unstructured databases are becoming more prevalent, gathering raw data from everywhere,” said Cray’s Bolding. “Now you start asking very complex questions, and it starts to create links between sets of data.”

The YarcData unit is helping the U.S. government detect fraud patterns in Medicare and Medicaid payments. Private sector customers include medical research group Mayo Clinic and several financial services, life sciences and telecommunications firms, which Cray cannot name for contractual reasons.

New efforts are working and should boost revenue over time, said Sid Parakh, an analyst at fund firm McAdams Wright Ragen.

“This is not a commodity market. It takes years of experience,” said Conway at IDC. “It’s easy to build a big computer, but it’s not easy to build a big computer that works.”

source: interaksyon.com