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Day 2: Big Data Innovation Summit 2014 #DataWest14
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Hello again big data fans – from where I’ve learned the San Francisco 49’ers will be playing their 2014 NFL season at Levi’s Stadium… Santa Clara!
(BTW, the stadium – from what I could see – is beautiful! I’m a big NFL fan, and there’s now another reason to come to the San Jose area, other than all the cloud / big data conferences.)
Got a lot of great feedback on yesterday’s “Day 1” post of the summit, so here are some observations from the final day of the conference.
- Yahoo’s Duru Ahanotu spoke through driving efficiency in how data teams are organized, going through the permutations of generalists vs specialists and centralized vs de-centralized, and how to best address teams in each model.
. - PayPal’s Moises Nascimento (who is a very captivating speaker) drove the point home, that though we are now adopting many of the new data technologies like Hadoop and NoSQL, most of our existing data sources and toolsets still provide value – so there is value in leveraging ALL data sources.
. - Moises also made a point of highlighting that data manipulation is best handled at the SYSTEM level, while data analysis is better managed at the ENTERPRISE level
. - In HP’s discussion, they introduced the concept of the GEOBYTE – 10^30 bytes, a size of data that the human race is expected to hit in the next few years.
To provide context on the magnitude of a GEOBYTE (10^30 bytes), there is estimated to only be 10^19 GRAINS OF SAND ON THE EARTH. Think about that for a second.
- The team also highlighted their view on “Big BI” vs “Big Data”
- Big BI – same types of analysis but on more data; more batch processing; results that were not easily actionable
- Big Data – joining datasets that have not been previously joined, near real time analysis, action oriented results
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- I thought Ancestry.com had one of the best sessions of the event, as they went deep into the GERMLINE algorithm that was the foundation of their business technology, and how they had to create jermline (now with a “j”) based on Hadoop / HDFS to create a SCALABLE matching engine. As we all know, SCALE matters. The performance and speed benchmarks between the “G” project and the “j” project were mindblowing.
. - Finally, sat in on the Netflix session – in addition to being a big fan of Netflix, as both a consumer and a tech observer, I’ve always been impressed with the way Netflix has evolved their business, and continues to do so. In this session, they went into great detail on their use of the Amazon cloud services, and their open source projects as a layer above to enhance functionality and deploy features. Topics touched on included red / black deployment to allow ease of features into production, and the importance of graceful degradation, so that a failure can be less of a catastrophic event for the end user.
.- One very telling statement is really a commentary on the value of use and participation in the open source process – Netflix was clear that they see value in being an open source contributor / leader is that it preserves the future of their systems – rather than sitting back and letting the industry decide their direction with tools and tech, Netflix uses open source to help drive and lead the industry to where they see value.
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- One very telling statement is really a commentary on the value of use and participation in the open source process – Netflix was clear that they see value in being an open source contributor / leader is that it preserves the future of their systems – rather than sitting back and letting the industry decide their direction with tools and tech, Netflix uses open source to help drive and lead the industry to where they see value.
- (I did resist the urge to ask the Netflix presenter when the next season of “House of Cards” would come out. 🙂 )
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One of the frequent questions that came up at the Dell booth was “what is Dell doing in big data?”
The answer? Actually… quite a bit, and for quite a while.
Between the Dell Apache Hadoop HW+SW+Services Solution, the Toad BI suite, the Kitenga analytics toolsets, and our growing HPC business, Dell has been a part of this movement since its early days. I’d recommend you drop us a line at Hadoop@Dell.com or visit us at http://www.Dell.com/Hadoop to learn more.
If you were out at the show this week, be sure to leave a comment on your thoughts as well.
Hope everyone has safe trips home, and we’ll see you at the next big data get-together!
Until next time,
JBG
@jbgeorge
Citrix Synergy 2011: Day 2 – Simon Sez!
Hello (again) from San Francisco – for the last time this week!
I’ll be heading back to Austin tomorrow, but it was great being here in California for a few days, and being a part of what was happening at Citrix Synergy 2011.
Day 2 started a bit slow, but Simon Crosby certainly got us back on track.
Simon Crosby on stage at Citrix Synergy
Here are the highlights:
- DJ Solomon was running music before the session and at the after party – I gotta say I was impressed. I’m not a big club beat guy, but this was good tunage.
- Citrix Partner Awards: Gluster – Best Partner Solution for Accelerating Cloud and Best in Show! App-DNA wins best partner solution for desktop transformation, and Abiquo wins best partner solution for virtual datacenters.
- After the Citrix Partner Solution Awards, Simon Crosby took the stage – I’d been looking forward to this – Simon never fails to provide surprise and insight.
- It should be obvious, but a lot of people still don’t get this – virtualiztion is not the same thing as cloud. Does virtualization have a place in cloud? Yes. Can you evolve from a highly virtualized environment to a cloud? Yes. But there is a purer way taken advantage of all the inherent characteristics of cloud (elasticity, mutli-tenancy, etc) by designing and building cloud from the ground up – something that platforms like OpenStack offers. (Check out the whitepaper at www.Dell.com/OpenStack to learn more about that design methodology.)
- OpenStack will help drive what we need in the cloud – getting key vendors together to figure out and build the cloud out right. – Simon Crosby
- To delight (users) and to protect (enterprises) – that is the mission of IT – Simon Crosby
- Interesting analogy from Simon: private cloud vs private cloud similar to driving your own car vs flying in a commercial plane – we drive our own cars, have control, etc – commercial airlines focus on building in process so that air travel is safe and reliable. Interesting fact – the FAA was created by the airlines to help ease people’s fear of flying by implementing standards and a governing body.
- Enterprises are seeking economics, elasticity, and pay-as-you-go from the cloud. – Simon Crosby
- Our consumer choices are increasingly impacting our workplace – Simon Crosby
- Roughly 100% of users violate their company’s security policy to get their job done – apps, public cloud access, etc. It’s important that we as an industry recognize that and leverage it for progress.
- Tarkan Maner, CEO of Wyse – wow, quite a captivating speaker. Was quite comfortable making a number of claims about thin clients and the future of computing, a number of which I’m not in agreement with (there is now no need for thick clients, etc), but overall, I enjoyed his address. Some key takeaways include cloud recommendations: start working toward hybrid cloud, build based on policies, develop to open standards, ensure the right and evolved IT skills are in place, and put users before infrastructure.
- Also learned a new phrase – “FInT this.” = Facebook, Linked In, Twitter. Do any of you actually say this?
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- Train at Citrix Synergy!
Zynga CTO Allan Leinwand also presented today speaking about their zCloud – they went from concept to production in 6 months, and can provision 1000 servers within 24 hours now. They are all about “scale fast or fail fast.” Nice to see that we as a group are starting to understand this notion. Nice quote to the crowd during his discussion: “Some of you might be playing our games right now.”
- Also got a chance to interact with friends in the press as well as users who wanted to know more about OpenStack and Dell’s role in Project Olympus and its Early Access Program. You can also drop me an email at OpenStack@Dell.com if you want to learn more.
- And to top it all off – Train in concert at the Synergy afterparty!
The twitterati was in full swing as well – check out #CitrixSynergy.
Citrix fans – it’s been fun – see you next year!
Until next time,
JOSEPH
@jbgeorge
Thoughts from 2010 Gartner Data Center Conference (Part 1)
This week, I had the pleasure of attending the 2010 Gartner Data Center conference – got to see a lot of old friends, meet new friends, and learn a lot about what Gartner sees coming down the road.
This year's Gartner Data Center Conference was held at Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas, NV
It was also a chance to talk to a number of folks about what’s happening at their own data centers, what they’re looking to solve, and what they’d like to see start happening in the industry.
Here are some key nuggets I walked away with – I’ll post again tomorrow with the rest:
- When it comes to implementing cloud, we cannot allow “20th century industrial models to sap 21st century innovation.”
- There’s still not a good answer for failure remediation in the cloud – credit due to downtime is just not good enough.
- Expect the community cloud concept to continue to draw interest. (Community clouds are clouds that service specific areas like banking or healthcare, where compliance, etc would be a requirement for its customers.)
- The next big business opportunity could be cloud brokers as the new systems integrators
- Great quote from Phil Dawson regarding due diligence before virtualizating anything – “Don’t virtualize rubbish – otherwise you have virtual rubbish.”
- We often forget that virtualization is more than just servers and storage – there are apps, desktops, etc
- Client virtualization / VDI is still top of a number of minds, though many are still at the investigative stage. There are still lingering questions about user adoption, bandwidth / network constraints, and ROI. (Though I am a big believer.)
- When we build staffs, we should strive for them to be “T-shaped” – technically deep in few areas, but linkages to the broader business.
- It’s important to run IT as a business – remember that it is providing something of value that its customer is willing to pay for
- Some good discussion on IT chargeback and allocation, which many are not doing today, but forsee implementing in the future. Four required characteristics of IT chargeback: simplicity, fairness, predictability, and control.
Also got a walkthrough of the IBM containerized data center, as well as SGI’s container – both very cool. (No pun intended.) I’ve now had the pleasure to see the modular / container data centers from HP, Dell, IBM, and SGI first hand.
Some interesting stats and statistical predictions from Gartner:
- 2/3 of the live audience was polled said they will be pursuing a private cloud strategy by 2014
- What’s the top concern regarding cloud computing? Security and privacy are still at the top.
- If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world. Twitter – the 7th. (Wow.)
- There has been more video uploaded to YouTube in the last 2 months than if ABC, NBC, and CBS had been airing content 24/7/365 continuously since 1948. (WOW.)
- Data centers can consume 40x – 100x more energy than the offices they support.
- An 8,000 square foot datacenter could cost $1.6M per year for just power.
- Data centers will be significantly smaller in the next 5 – 10 years
- Data expected to grow 800% over the next 5 years, and 80% of it will likely be unstructured.
- Today’s labor force will have 10 – 14 jobs by age 38
As you can tell, just a lot of good discussion on cloud, data centers, power, and overall IT.
OK, don’t want to overload more than I have – will back tomorrow night.
(UPDATE: Click here for Part 2.)
Until next time.
JBGeorge
@jbgeorge
OpenStack Design Summit – Day 1 Review
Wanted to provide some visibility to the great stuff happening at the OpenStack Design Summit at the Weston Center in San Antonio.
- Intention is to draft requirements and specs for the January release of OpenStack
- ~300 attendees total – 90 companies and 12 countries represented
- Companies in attenance include Dell, Citrix, RightScale, Cloudkick, Canonical, NASA, and many others
- Technical and business tracks running touching on topics like evolution of the datacenter, Bexar release plans, and many others
- Lots of Twitter action via #openstack
- Discussion of cloud deployments from the hardware perspective, the software perspective, the services perspective
- Lots of hallway conversations between companies – networking-a-rama!
- Great party at Rackspace HQ last night
- Pictures Day 1 at from the event at http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinhole/tags/openstack/ and http://www.openstack.org/blog/2010/11/openstack-design-summit-day-1-pictures/
Will try to provide an update tonight after today’s festivities as well.
Some personal thoughts that have been ruminating lately, and are becoming confirmed in my mind this week.
- No matter what side of the fence you’re on, cloud will need to eventually settle at a model that allows users to evaluate needs, business strategy, etc, then decide HOW MUCH to put in the hosted / public cloud, HOW MUCH to put in the private cloud (whether on premise or of premise), and then implement a BURSTING capability.
- Services are going to be a key part of broader migration to the cloud, especially at the enterprise level
- We, as a group, are doing better on this, but we’re not spending enough time understanding and designing the networks that will drive our clouds. More thought, discussion, and debate need to be done on this topic asap.
For the latest happenings at the Design Summit, search Twitter for #openstack (direct link = http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23openstack). You can also learn more about OpenStack at www.openstack.org.
Also, if you’re at the event, and interested in seeing the Dell PowerEdge C servers that are running at the event, and will power the InstallFest later this week, find me, tweet me, etc, and I’ll get you into the server room.
Until next time,
JBGeorge
www.jbgeorge.net / @jbgeorge
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