Although it was very conceptual to talk about big data a few years ago in the context of exploding data growth, the reason that the industry is still talking about big data today is because of the critical ways businesses are using it.
As a case in point, we recently began work with a customer in the travel industry that is using big data to mine all kinds of data from around the world for amazing insights. Much of this data would have been considered “un-mineable” (okay, I admit to making that word up) just a few years ago: Facebook posts, Tweets, weather data, and even close captioning from local news stations.
Building a big data solution can, of course, be a big job—and big projects in the IT world are often synonymous with protracted planning, pushed-out milestones and vaunted ROI that never arrives. This customer went in with a different mindset: they wanted to keep it small. That meant containing the infrastructure to dedicated hardware with a small footprint, leveraging managed services rather than expanding their IT team, and launching a working solution in less than six months as part of an aggressive go-to-market strategy.
When you’re building a big data solution, there are a few key pieces to consider including the analytics platform, the hardware that will run it, and the people who will manage it. For the first piece, this customer quickly identified SAP HANA as their analytics platform. SAP HANA excels at quickly delivering deep analytic insight from both structured and semi-structured data, without the need for a lot of up-front data cleansing/management.
Once the customer had committed to SAP HANA, the remaining pieces fell into place. They selected a converged infrastructure appliance, the HP ConvergedSystem 500, to provide the underlying infrastructure—computing, storage, and networking—for their big data solution. The ConvergedSystem 500 features an in-memory database—a requirement for SAP HANA—and is optimized for SAP HANA workloads to deliver faster analytic performance.
A lot of that optimization happens as the result of the Intel processors featured in the system, which are themselves optimized for SAP HANA. In fact, the whole SAP HANA, HP ConvergedSystem and Intel Xeon E7 V2 micoprocessor combination is the result of tight collaboration between the three companies to ensure that enterprises get the best performance possible.
As for the role of Rolta AdvizeX, we’re sort of the glue that holds those pieces together. We helped the customer size out the hardware, configured it, and managed it once the system entered into production state. More importantly, we had the hard-to-obtain skills that the customer needed to make this project happen quickly, from building the data models to mapping out their disaster recovery strategy.
Searching the world for data definitely made business sense for this travel company; searching the world for the IT talent to put it all together did not. Today, they’re helping their customers get where they need to go, and we helped them get there faster with the right mix of services and industry-leading technology from HP and Intel. ▪