The JBGeorge Tech Blog

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Hello from sunny, Santa Clara!

My team and I are here at the BIG DATA INNOVATION SUMMIT representing Dell (the company I work for), and it’s been a great day one.

I just wanted to take a few minutes to jot down some interesting ideas I heard today:

• In Daniel Austin’s keynote, he addressed that the “Internet of things” should really be the “individual network of things” – highlighting that the number of devices, their connectivity, their availability, and their partitioning is what will be key in the future.
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• One data point that also came out of Daniel’s talk – every person is predicted to generate 20 PETABYTES of data over the course of a lifetime!
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• Juan Lavista of Bing hit on a number of key myths around big data:
  • the most important part of big data is its size
  • to do big data, all you need is Hadoop
  • with big data, theory is no longer needed
  • data scientists are always right 🙂

QUOTE OF THE DAY:  “Correlation does not yield causation.” – Juan Lavista (Bing)

• Anthony Scriffignano was quick to admonish the audience that “it’s not just about data, it’s not just about the math…  [data] relationships matter.”
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• The state of Utah state government is taking a very progressive view to areas that analytics can help drive efficiency in at that level – census data use, welfare system fraud, etc.  And it appears Utah is taking a leadership position in doing so.

I also had the privilege of moderating a panel on the topic of the convergence between HPC and the big data spaces, with representatives on the panel from Dell (Armando Acosta), Intel (Brent Gorda), and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (Niall Gaffney).  Some great discussion about the connections between the two, plus tech talk on the Lustre plug-in and the SLURM resource management project.

Additionally, Dell product strategists Sanjeet Singh and Joey Jablonski presented on a number of real user implementations of big data and analytics technologies – from university student retention projects to building a true centralized, enterprise data hub.  Extremely informative.

All in all, a great day one!

If you’re out here, stop by and visit us at the Dell booth.  We’ll be showcasing our hadoop and big data solutions, as well as some of the analytics capabilities we offer.

(We’ll also be giving away a Dell tablet on Thursday at 1:30, so be sure to get entered into the drawing early.)

Stay tuned, and I’ll drop another update tomorrow.

Until next time,

JOSEPH
@jbgeorge