Big Data Game Changer: Federation Business Data Lake

By: Josh Kahn, Senior Vice President, Global Solutions, EMC Corporation

NOTE: This piece was originally posted on March 23, 2015 to EMC's Pulse blog.

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EMC Corporation

Mar 23, 2015, 03:21 ET

HOPKINTON, Mass., March 23, 2015 /PRNewswire/ --

http://pulseblog.emc.com/2015/03/23/big-data-game-changer-federation-business-data-lake/

Today, the world thrives on data. Analytics can build competitive advantage, accelerate revenue growth, and even create entirely new industries. But it's one thing to generate and store a lot of data; it's another thing altogether to turn it into the kind of actionable insight that can change the game for your company. This is a challenge that EMC Federation members EMC Information Infrastructure, Pivotal, VMware and VCE have undertaken with today's announcement of the Federation Business Data Lake.

Watch the Federation Business Data Lake Virtual Launch Event.

Big Data analytics use cases range from customer sentiment analysis to fraud detection to precision farming and thousands of others. Each one has unique technology and data requirements. To take advantage of Big Data, you need to capture and store a wide variety of data types, and be able to access and analyze it when needed. The combination of technologies needed to do that is what we call a Data Lake, and it allows organizations to build new applications, new products and new business models that will redefine their business.

Many IT organizations have struggled to keep up with the demands of their business users and enable rapid deployment of Big Data analytics. The challenge for them has been the complexity of mapping analytics use cases to the right technology stack and right storage platform, then deploying and configuring it all together.

Today, the EMC Federation makes the deployment of Data Lakes simple. Our new Business Data Lake engineered solution is built on the EMC Federation's best-of-breed products for Big Data including EMC storage, VMware vSphere running on Vblocks, the Pivotal Big Data Suite and Pivotal Cloud Foundry. In addition to the Federation technologies, the Federation Business Data Lake supports a robust ecosystem of third-party analytics products including Tableau and SAS.

To complement these industry-leading technologies, EMC engineered the outcome by providing predefined analytics use cases with automated provisioning and configuration, enabling customers to realize game-changing value from Big Data analytics in as little as seven days. The Federation Business Data Lake is the next step in our journey towards converged solutions that will redefine infrastructure from hardware up through the application stack, providing the maximum speed and agility to IT organizations.

The Federation Business Data Lake will be offered through Directed Availability in April 2015. EMC will also provide additional Data Lake solutions to enable customer choice. These solutions enable customers to use Cloudera and Hortonworks and will be available for Directed Availability in April 2015 also.

Today's announcement is just the beginning. The Federation Business Data Lake has a robust roadmap and will continue to add new functionality. Over the next several months we'll add data ingest; data indexing for data in the Data Lake and outside it; data governance to enforce policies and ensure users have only the right data sets; and self-service capabilities for analysts to build an environment and select the relevant data sets without manual intervention from IT.

For full details, go to the Federation Business Data Lake on-demand launch to watch a demo on how you can quickly stand up Big Data analytics workloads on the Federation Business Data Lake, and change the game for your company.