Smarter Storage
Today storage performance is boosted with new solid-state drive (SSD) technology. Many people think this is a new way to boost performance. The problem, though, is the price of these expensive parts. So, the trade-off between performance and price is not easy to find. Nobody can imagine using terabytes and terabytes of SSD in a monolithic approach because the cost would be prohibitive for a large-scale project.
Storage technology is making a transition. People with little knowledge about storage or the underlying technologies are automatically backing up their files on Apple’s iCloud or other private cloud options. I see less and less USB drives and find more people pulling files from Dropbox.
Today’s IT security needs to be bullet-proof to protect mission critical data and customer information. Issues like identity and access control, privacy issues, cross-border translation and more are on the agenda at IBM Edge 2013.
Flash storage has been the key to explosive growth of smartphones and tablets. With no moving parts and very low power consumption, flash is ideal for the billions of mobile devices used around the world today. Flash is also found today in commercial systems in the form of hybrid flash/disk storage that combines semiconductor-based storage as an adjunct to conventional disk drives, with Flash reserved for the most time-critical workloads.
IBM PureSystems (Expert Integrated Systems) will be a key highlight of the upcoming IBM Edge conference. IBM PureSystems is a groundbreaking product family of solutions that uses built-in patterns, based on years of IT experiences and best practices, to automate many of the complex cloud-related development, deployment, and configuration tasks. Because tasks are now automated, IBM customers using PureSystems have been able to reap significant cost and labor savings.
Butterfly, a small company located close to London, has been working with IBM for a couple of years to help analyze existing storage environments and compare them with the actual storage technology from IBM.
South Africa is a huge country with a new, modern communications infrastructure. In fact, the country has some of the best communications coverage on the continent of Africa. I was there on a business-related trip, and I did meet with IBM clients, but I also went to national parks, visited the Apartheid Museum and went on a safari. My cell phone worked everywhere I visited.
So what is Big Data? Technically it’s a group of data that becomes so large, it becomes challenging to work with and store. Big data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals to name a few.
Learn how the Smarter Computing approach, when allied with smarter analytics, can increase the value of big data and power your business forward in the Smarter Computing Analyst Paper by Bola Rotibi, Research Director at Creative Intellect Consulting.
Find us on: