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From the Blogosphere

New technologies allow schools, colleges and universities to analyze absolutely everything that happens. From student behavior, testing results, career development of students as well as educational needs based on changing societies. A lot of this data has already been stored and is us...
In the coming years, big data will change the way organisations and societies are operated and managed. Big data however, is not the only trend that will impact significantly how organisations operate. Another major trend at the moment is gamification. Gamification will change the way ...
I'd like to address a recent blog post in CloudTweaks titled, "Cloudera Not Cutting It With Big Data Security." The author makes a number of very salient and valid points about Hadoop security… or lack thereof. Indeed the Apache Hadoop platform, which includes HDFS and MapReduce and o...
When Lori and I were writing import/export routines for a large software vendor, we had a phrase to remind ourselves that what we loved was not necessarily the all-important part of what we were doing. We used to say “It’s all about the data”, almost as a mantra, to keep our team (I wa...
Master Data Management (MDM) is a very important data governance aspect in enterprises whereby MDM enables the development of a "Single Version of Truth." MDM establishes Single Version of Truth by providing common descriptions for enterprise-wide entities. Need for MDM in Big Data Pr...
How do you know whether you are dealing with Big Data or Small Data? I’m constantly asked for my definition of “Big Data”. Well, here it is…for batch analytics. Queries are complex requiring many concurrent data modifications, a rich breadth of operators, and many selectivity constrai...
Are you AWS certified? Last week several reporters, including Gathering Clouds friend in the field Barb Darrow, analyzed Amazon’s recent announcement of its cloud certification program. Widely seen as a positive move for the company, the announcement does raise some questions. While ...
In-Q-Tel just posted a press release on a recent strategic partnership and technology development agreement with a firm called Apigee. That statement alone is all the savvy technologist needs to know to start diving into Apigee. In-Q-Tel has a reputation for applying lots of focused th...
Cloud solutions are evolving rapidly with users eager to easily leverage the underlying infrastructure. Platform as a Service (PaaS) is one option that help developers meet their needs. Typical cloud computing conferences feature a large contingent of pay-to-pay sponsors who are look...
A colleague relayed this story: At a recent toastmasters meeting, they did a survey. They were asked what does each of the following words mean, when represented as a percentage? Sometimes Frequently Rarely Often Usually For example, my friend interpreted “Frequently” to mean “...
When many of us hear the term Big Data, we think Hadoop. That’s only natural as Hadoop has helped countless organizations overcome huge Big Data challenges, at relatively low cost. No surprise, therefore, that analysts expect global demand for Hadoop to grow to $13.95 billion by 2017. ...
Due to the unprecedented volume, variety, and velocity of Big Data, it is neither trivial nor straightforward to find a clear path to jumpstart the Big Data journey. This space is overwhelmingly crowded with so many immature options and evolving solutions. To some extent it is somewhat...
The term Big Data is going to become a key part of the forward-looking business technology debate among informed, proactive and ICT savvy executives. But what's really driving the growing demand for meaningful solutions? While most companies are collecting, storing and analyzing data,...
by Joseph Rickert When talking with data scientists and analysts — who are working with large scale data analytics platforms such as Hadoop — about the best way to do some sophisticated modeling task it is not uncommon for someone to say, "We have all of the data. Why not just use it a...
Technology has been taken over by the Cloud. Putting it in simple terms, ‘Cloud’ is the new meme used to describe nirvana from clogged up computers and saving files directly to the internet. So how does it work? Essentially, instead of saving files to a hard disk or using software on ...
Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced global availability of Elastic Block Storage (EBS) optimized support for four additional Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) instance types. The support enables optimized performance between standard and provisioned IOP EBS volumes and EC2 instanc...
MaaS (Model as a Service) sets a new concept to order and classify data modeling design and deployment to the Cloud. MaaS changes the way to move data to the Cloud because allows to define data taxonomy, size and contents. Starting from data model design, MaaS might guide the DaaS (Dat...
How do you work with a remote product owner who is in a different time zone with very little overlap of normal working hours? An agile puritan would have a simple answer – Don’t. There is an underlying assumption behind this statement. The assumption is that the product owner can pro...
Amazon continues to add more features to make AWS more appealing to enterprises and developers. Also, Rackspace has announced the launch of Rackspace Cloud Backup and introduced new features on Rackspace Open Cloud Servers. Here’s a quick summary of cloud happenings over the last week...
A few months back, Gartner placed big data at the peak of its hype cycle for cloud computing, meaning most big data products are solutions looking for a problem. I always find this bad entrepreneurial habit to be one of the most frustrating of our industry. Having recently joined Meltw...
It sounds like a parlor trick, but one of the benefits of API centric de-facto standards such as REST and JSON is they allow relatively seamless communication between software systems. This makes it possible to combine technologies to instantly bring out new capabilities. In particul...
Cyber News we are tracking today: Having multiple hypervisors is a growing trend in the virtualization. Customers have mixed emotions about VMware recent purchase of the Virsto software product. Red Cross decided to use Microsoft Office 365. and more. Having multiple hypervisors is...
You are a regional bank who is under heavier regulation, focused on risk management, and expanding your mobile offerings. You are seeking ways to get ahead of your competition through the use of Big Data by optimizing financial decisions and yields. What if there was an easy and autom...
Agile works! If you have any doubt about it just look at the adoption rate … look at the study results published … or just try it yourself. Offshoring also works! Again, if you have any doubt, just look at the growth of offshoring … look at the success of the success of the India ba...
Companies want to migrate data to cloud and work from cloud directly. However, they don’t have time to wait for the data migration to happen if it is taking a long time. Here is a typical conversation around data migration to the cloud. “Can Gladinet work as a shared network drive for...
In part 4 of the storage subsystem, we’ll provide some guidelines for selecting the stripe-size unit for your selected storage solution. Hardware-managed arrays allow stripe unit sizes ranging from 4 KB to more than 1 MB. The ideal stripe unit size maximizes the disk activity without u...
I like putting faces to names. Steve Lohr did the research and wrote an article about the origin of the term Big Data in The New York Times. I could not resist the temptation to put faces to the names. Right or wrong, all the facts are from his article. His first step in the research...
Data is the new currency of business and we are in the era of data-intensive computing. Much has been written on Big Data throughout 2012 and customers around the world are struggling to figure out its significance to their businesses. Someone said there are 3 I’s to Big Data. There a...
Machine learning and IT analytics can be just as beneficial to IT operations as it is for monitoring vital signs of premature babies to identify danger signs too subtle or abnormal to be detected by a human. But an enterprise must be willing to implement monitoring and instrumentatio...
A lot has been written about the difference between REST APIs and SOAP Web Services. The technical differences are well known at this stage. SOAP is heavyweight, while REST is light and mobile-friendly. However, there is another key difference which is often overlooked: It is easy to ...
Just collecting and storing 'big data' doesn't drive value to an organization's bottom line. The real issue is the ability to quickly communicate with users and ask any question, any time, no matter how much data you have. Realtime push technology gives big data users a competitive ...
Am I the only person who thinks that we need a clear, well understood and unambiguous determine if the development process that you are following can be classified as Agile development process? Do you necessarily have to have a small, co-located, cross-functional team to be able to cl...
What is the “Social Journey” and why is it important to integrate community and web together? I realized that some of you may be asking that question why would I put my team and community through this process and spend the level of effort to make it happen. Well, The answer is 48% and ...
This is the third in a multi-part series of posts (read first post here and second post here) looking at what else EMC announced today in addition to an enhanced VMAX 10K and dispelling the myth that large storage arrays are dead (or at least for now). In addition to the VMAX 10K spec...
The PaaS market is filled with noise. "Platform as a Service" is surrounded with blind men around the elephant, each with their own definition PaaS. This is further compounded by the fact that the Application Platforms landscape is changing quickly as well. We keep hearing that "Develo...
Gone are the days when the cloud meant simply a hosted virtual instance or resource on some provider's network. We're seeing all sorts of new variants and twists emerge. I'm not just referring to the use of storage or compute resources or those that allow for elastic computing, such as...
Technical Debt is worth nothing if no pragmatic action is taken into code, in order to control and tackle it. To illustrate Scertify’s capability to automatically correct code defects that increase this unintended debt, we performed code refactoring on two subprojects of the Hadoop pro...
Yesterday, I nearly drowned in a sea of extraneous data. In just one hour during an important conference call, my laptop overflowed with 300 e-mails from an email thread I frankly didn’t care about. Imagine how much time I could have saved if my system knew I was unavailable, and sent ...
I always wanted to write, ‘In the USA Today, today’ in the Life section snapshots sidebar there is an interesting stat from a December 2012 Ponemon Institute study of 80 health care organizations showing that the data lost or stolen most often are our medical records at 48% and billing...
Ultimately cloud computing will be driven by customer needs for control and enabled by a new generation of hybrid cloud solutions. Today public and private cloud operating models offer islands of IT operating efficiency that can be highly desirable for applications and services specif...