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August 3, 2012

This Week’s Big Data Big Five

Datanami Staff

This week we swoop in over Cray’s headquarters in Seattle, where all is uncharacteristically bright and sunny, look into what DDN is doing to simplify big data storage, gaze briefly at Actian Corporation and its claims of providing a real-time element to Hadoop and more, including news from SAP and others.

Without further delay, let’s start off the week in review with supercomputing giant Cray, which just posted some solid results…

Brighter Skies for Cray

Supercomputing and big data company, Cray, which is setting its YarcData division as a priority this year, has announced a rather stellar year revenue-wise. The company’s revenue for the quarter was $84.2 million compared to $67.9 million in the prior year period.

“We had a very strong quarter, led by the acceptance of our first petaflops system at a large commercial customer and the completion of a $140 million asset sale,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray.

Ungaro noted that, “During the first half of the year, we made good progress on each of our three growth initiatives while also delivering strong operating results. We were recently awarded a number of exciting new wins for our next-generation supercomputer, called ‘Cascade’, which is planned for general availability next year. We have a lot of work left to do in order to achieve our outlook for this year, but our business is in excellent shape as we continue to build on our strong market position now and into the future.”

Supercomputer sales aside, it will be interesting to watch its big data initiative, which was behind a recent contest that seeks to reward those willing to wrangle code that will tackle big data problems in research and enterprise.

The company reported net income for the quarter of $147.4 million or $3.91 diluted income per share compared to a net loss of ($3.0 million) or ($0.08) per share in the second quarter of 2011. The second quarter of 2012 operating results included a $139.1 million pre-tax gain, which resulted from the sale of the Cray’s Gemini interconnect hardware development program to Intel Corporation.

Next — DDN Addresses Big Data Storage Management >


DDN Addresses Big Data Storage Management

DataDirect Networks (DDN),  which focuses on massively scalable storage, has unveiled DirectMon, a robust centralized management solution for DDN’s existing storage, file system, and In-Storage Processing technology.

As the company stated this week, “With a unified interface designed to handle all aspects of Big Data storage infrastructure administration, DDN’s DirectMon minimizes administrator overhead and provides a comprehensive framework for both real-time and predictive systems management and tuning of SAN, NAS and parallel file storage environments.”

“DDN’s DirectMon takes the complexity out of managing even the world’s largest Big Data environments, and enables our customers to deploy simple infrastructure capable of scaling up for deep storage capacity and scaling out for added storage capacity and performance,” said Jean Luc Chatelain, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Technology at DDN. “DirectMon increases our customers’ agility as they continue to resolve critical growth and challenges in the Big Data era.”

DirectMon is immediately available for DDN’s SFA platforms, including the 6620, 10K and 12K series of products. Additionally, DirectMon will immediately support DDN’s GRIDScaler file system and IBM GPFS environments. This is the first of a release strategy that will, over time, address the broader range of DDN’s file storage products as well as the company’s analytics infrastructure direction.

Next — Actian’s “Real-Time” Hadoop Element >


Actian’s “Real-Time” Hadoop Element

This week Actian Corporation announced the upcoming release of its bi-directional Hadoop Data Connector at the TDWI World Conference in San Diego, which they say will enable businesses and enterprises to drive down the costs of extracting valuable information from their Hadoop data storage.

The connector will be available for general download at the end of 2012. The Hadoop Data Connector enables Actian Vectorwise, the company’s analytical database, to optimize the analysis of big data with bidirectional data integration. This will allow businesses to quickly take unstructured Hadoop data into Vectorwise creating information and then placing that information back into the Hadoop store or into operational systems.

Vectorwise has focused on high-performance Hadoop analysis with leading social media companies such as IsCool and NK. They claim their Hadoop Connector takes this one step further by operationalizing the ability to constantly move data in near real-time in and out of analysis and into operational systems.

Fred Gallagher, general manager of Vectorwise at Actian Corporation. “Actian Vectorwise is helping companies solve their big data analysis problems in real-time, and now we are bringing that same record breaking performance and price/performance to Hadoop data making it an opportunity of operational competitive advantage. Businesses from finance to social media and beyond can now capitalize on the vision of Hadoop to create business value. We are helping customers to take action on their really big data.”

Next — SAP HANA Tackles Unstructured Social Sentiment>


SAP HANA Tackles Unstructured Social Sentiment

SAP has introduced a new solution to help organizations gain real-time insights into market trends and customer sentiment via the The SAP rapid-deployment solution for sentiment intelligence with SAP HANA.

The company says its “rapid-deployment solution for sentiment intelligence” with SAP HANA lets users analyze customer sentiment from social networking sites, communities, wikis, blogs and other sources, and combines the information with customer relationship management (CRM) text data. Users can evaluate customers’ insights through easy-to-read views on their mobile devices, tablets or desktops.

“Mining unstructured data can provide a direct path to understanding how customers are responding to products, brands and overall company values,” said Shawn Rogers, vice president of research, Enterprise Management Associates. “As the amount of unstructured data – especially from social media sources – continues to grow, companies have the opportunity to really understand their customers if the information is captured and analyzed effectively. SAP’s integrated approach helps users gain deeper insights from company and external information to more quickly and easily make sense of the ever-growing amount of data and act on it.”

The SAP rapid-deployment solution for sentiment intelligence with SAP HANA loads text data from Twitter, Facebook, the  SAP StreamWork applicationand any other Web channel with a publicly available API. It then applies semantic analysis using text data processing capabilities from SAP Data Services software. Decision-makers can visualize customers’ sentiments toward their products and brands in real time using SAP BusinessObjects Explorer software and HANA.

Next — DataIQ Aims to Provide Unstructured View >


DataIQ Aims to Provide Unstructured View

StoredIQ this week announced DataIQ, a first-step application that they say is aimed at reducing the complexity of understanding and analyzing large complex data sets.

DataIQ has been designed to “give organizations a simple, low-cost, visualization solution to understand their unstructured data — without first moving it to a repository — to help answer data intelligence questions that challenge many of today’s IT organizations such as:

  • How much data do you have across your enterprise?
  • What are your largest repositories?
  • How much old, un-used data do you have and where is it?
  • Who owns data that is violating corporate policies?
  • Which data is relevant to your business and which is just taking up space?

“Every company has more data than it can manage. But few can precisely locate it, assess the value of it, or make much sense out of it when they need to,” said Ted Friedman, vice president and distinguished analyst with Gartner. “Information management projects can be very intimidating. To set a course for success, organizations need to build insight regarding the whereabouts, meaning, and usage of their data.”

Designed to run on the StoredIQ Platform, DataIQ the company says the offering scales from terabytes to petabytes, from single corporate offices to global enterprises, and provides a single, holistic view across a multitude of enterprise data sources and hundreds of file types — without moving any data from its native location.

According to Phil Myers, CEO of StoredIQ. “DataIQ was designed as a quick start data intelligence application that empowers customers with knowledge about their data to better plan and prepare for any information management project.”

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