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June 8, 2015

How Big Data Analytics Supports Tyrone’s ISP Customers in India

The big data revolution is sweeping across India, transforming engineering, science, healthcare, finance and every other aspect of business and society.

In particular, one vital segment of the nation’s economy, the Internet Service Providers (ISPs), are seeking better ways to use the massive amounts of information they and their customer’s generate to provide enhanced services and increase profits.

Just a few years ago, big data analytic tools were used only by large corporations that could pay the price – an outlay that included hiring highly educated (and expensive) data scientists and building a supporting IT infrastructure.

Now, with the advent of Hadoop and other open source tools, as well as the efficiencies of cloud computing, the drive to exploit the many benefits of big data is being democratized.

Organizations – like India’s ISPs – can now explore how big data analytics can help them adapt to new opportunities and challenges and bring advanced services and support to their customers. Tyrone, headquartered in Bangalore, is helping make this happen.

Tyrone is India’s leading provider of servers, storage, and back-up as well as offering big data and HPC solutions on its own clusters and in the cloud.

“For our larger customers, we are providing such services as traffic analysis, dealing with security attacks, and monitoring and analyzing the huge amounts of data they are generating,” says Sandeep Lodha, Tyrone CEO.

This, he says, includes the ISPs, who are facing a number of challenges resulting from the exponential growth of big data.

“About 50% of the work that comes in to Tyrone from our ISP customers has to do with log analysis and action items based on that analysis,” Lodha continues. He notes that just about everything generates logs – from Apple watches to devices connected up to the Internet of Things. And every log has its own specific challenges associated with ingesting, cleaning and running analytics in order for the ISP take timely action. This can range from warding off a denial of service attack to providing a new service that enhances the ISP’s competitive position.

One of the problems, Lodha points out, is that ISP routers generate huge amounts of data – including logs. But these routers lack the capacity to store large amounts of data in a complex, compressed format that can be easily and rapidly searched. For example, the ISP may want to determine the activity around a specific IP address during a certain time period. Or conduct a traffic analysis in order to optimize the network. In other instances, the ISP may need the system data to help ward off dangerous attacks on web sites it is hosting or to meet compliance requirements mandated by law enforcement agencies (LEA).

Tyrone is helping the ISPs deal with these and other big data challenges by creating a modular architecture specifically designed to handle the storage problem and provide all the capabilities necessary to ingest, clean and analyze customer data. The platform uses the Hadoop stack and Analytics Engine running on Tyrone servers powered by Intel Xeon processors. Tyrone now supports the Lustre file system as the underlying file system for Hadoop in response to the growing amounts of customer data generated on high performance computers. Data stored on systems based on Lustre and running Hadoop means that users do not have to transfer data back and forth between Lustre and HDFS.

Says Lodha, “Our modular approach allows us to maintain a highly compressed data footprint so our ISP customer do not have to spend a lot on data storage. Even with the compression, they can conduct analytics at a reasonable speed. If they want to speed up the analytics even more, we simply uncompress the data without making any changes to the analytics engine because of the modular architecture.”

Tyrone currently has six locations throughout India providing big data services to its customers, including the ISPs.

This in turn allows the ISPs to provide their Internet customers with new, improved and safer services based on the results of the big data analytics running on the Tyrone platforms.

 

tyronesystems.com

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