The Storage Chap / TechObsessedDad

 

The Top 10 Benefits of the EMC Federation Business Data Lake

I was recently asked what the Top 10 Benefits of the EMC Federation Business Data Lake were and upon searching was not able to find a concise list. So here is my first draft of the Top 10 Benefits of the EMC Federation Business Data Lake, something that I have no doubt will evolve over time.

1. 90/90/2

The EMC Federation Business Data Lake is designed to be able to accommodate 90% of the use cases, that 90% of organisations would require in the first two years of their big data analytics experience. This removes the risk of buying the wrong thing due to changing business requirements.

The EMC Federation Business Data Lake is a flexible infrastructure framework comprised of storage, compute and software that can scale and evolve with requirements. It enables you to ingest data, store that data, analyse that data, surface that data in a tailor made fashion to whomever should need it and allows application developers to create applications that can act on that data in realtime.

2. Consolidation

The EMC Federation Business Data Lake enables organisations to consolidate the departmental data silos into a single extensible repository that removes storage duplication, administration overheads and the need for ‘Shadow IT’.

3. Improved Insight

By consolidating the data into a single repository with more data sources organisations are able to generate even greater insights and data discovery.

4. Enterprise Ready Storage

The EMC Federation Business Data Lake consists of cost effective, large scale, enterprise ready, file and object storage, with native Hadoop integration. It enables in-place analytics, enterprise data protection and helps lower costs by eliminating the investment and management costs of a dedicated Hadoop infrastructure and enabling the organisation to scale compute and storage resources separately.

This enables organisations to store everything, without having to worry about what or why, so that it can be analysed in the future, if and when appropriate.

5. Pivotal Big Data Suite

The Federation Business Data Lake includes Pivotal’s Big Data Suite. The Pivotal Big Data Suite is the most complete approach for creating a data-centric enterprise. In a single bundle, you gain access to solutions for flexible deployment of a data lake, powerful tools for advanced analytics and data science and a portfolio of engines for supporting custom data-centric scale-out applications.

6. Third Party Integration

The Open-Source and Agile nature of Big Data Analytics means that new capabilities and applications are being developed regularly. The EMC Business Data Lake removes the potential for vendor lock-in by supporting the integration of third party applications and by supporting multiple Hadoop distributions (at the same time if required).

7. Application Development

We as an industry talk a lot about Big Data and Analytics. But the reality is that true transformation occurs when you “Catch people or things in the act of doing something and affect the outcome in real-time”. To do this we are increasingly reliant on applications. Applications are where the three megatrends of Social, Mobile and Big Data meet.

The EMC Federation Business Data Lake includes Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Pivotal Cloud Foundry is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that supplies developers with an automated, ready-to-use cloud computing environment and application services that can reduce time to market and increase operational agility.

8. Ingestion and Indexing of Data

The key to successful Big Data Analytics is the ability to analyse diverse sets of structured and unstructured data. The EMC Federation Business Data Lake includes an Ingest Engine with Connectors for many sources of data making integration far easier. As that data is ingested it can be classified to accelerate the discovery of relationships and identify what is most relevant to the business.

9. Self Service Catalogue

The EMC Federation Business Data Lake is designed to make the life of the IT organisation simple. It includes a Data and Analytics Service Catalogue that initially makes the life of IT easier by automating the deployment of clusters and resources; but that over time will enable self-service access to business users and developers.

10. Data Governance

Whilst there are many benefits to consolidating silos of storage one of the primary concerns becomes data security and accessibility. A Data Lake is designed to store ALL data, which could be public data, very private data or even regulated data. It is therefore imperative that roles and access permissions can be defined. The EMC Federation Business Data Lake include a Data Governor that enables Policy-Management for Data Access within the Data Lake.

{Edit 15/06/2015}

Okay I know that this was originally the Top 10 Benefits of the EMC Federation Business Data Lake, but I also said it would evolve over time.

11. Single Support

Whilst the EMC Federation Business Data Lake is an integrated stack of best-of-breed software, hardware and professional services ,one of the most important aspects is that it comes with one number for support of the entire stack. This is important as it de-risks operational service enabling fast problem resolution within the Federation Business Data Lake environment.