The fundamental shift from a traditional EDW architecture to the Business Data Lake is not just about a change in the technology stack. The focus is around bringing together business and IT as one cohesive team with a shared culture, methodology and toolset. We now live in a world where everyone in a company is a consumer of information, whether its from retail transactions, daily web traffic, or “the internet of things”. The Data Lake offers a way to interact and consume that information with the horizontal governance and flexibility they are looking for.
The Data Lake is a new term to describe a place to store unlimited amounts of data in any format, schema and type that is cost effective and massively scalable. In many ways, this is not unlike the operational data store seen between transactional systems and the data warehouse, but the Data Lake is bigger and less structured. Using the Hadoop file system (HDFS) this allows any file to be “dumped” in the lake with no attention to data integration or transformation. Then, when there are questions that need answers, that is the time to organize and sift through the chunks of data that will provide those answers.
A new way of thinking, the Data Lake is a concept that involves how to explore, extract, and analyze data with less movement and replication. ZData’s services help companies quickly test and adopt this concept, they work with enterprise’s by using scalable systems, software, and analytic tools to search, find, tag, explore and provision the data in their own Data Lake. Using open source and proprietary data processing software from Apache and its partner network, zData helps companies transform their data from its raw state to a finished product. In the end, this process is the basis for data driven methods that drive company wide decisions.
Data Lake, meet the Industrial Internet
The Data Lake can also be implemented using the industrial internet, or the internet of things. The industrial internet uses the power of the cloud to inter-connect and leverage machines embedded with sensors and sophisticated software. Resulting in real time continuous data providing a new context allowing us to extract meaning and provide decision making where we were unable to before. The deeper meshing of the digital and physical world holds the potential to bring about profound transformation to global industries like transportation, manufacturing, healthcare and communications.
Machines speaking with machines and providing automation to help us make faster and more statistically accurate decisions is the revolution of this “Internet of Things”. Decisive machines and predictive analytics – work together to increase sustainability and optimize our technological innovations.
zData understands the unique set of Big Data tools that drive the infrastructure of the Industrial Internet to meet your companies requirements. This Industrial Big Data platform not only requires the collection and aggregation of data from the largest range of industrial devices and software systems including both enterprise and web-based, it must also integrate data types such as sensor data, different response times, and real time process optimization. zData’s expertise in technologies that make up this advanced ecosystem are driving it quickly to the top of specialized Industrial Internet consulting. zData specialties in system level and infrastructure design allow your company to quickly understand the potential of leveraging software tools like GemfireXD, Hadoop, Greenplum, and Analytics/BI tools.
The “Internet of Things” is poised to outshine other data sources creating more than double that of any other platforms. Velocity of data generated is higher than in the consumer Internet and the variety of sensors and machines is much more complex. This in turn creates the need for offline data warehouses and modern distributed, scalable, nearline computing environments – a perfect application for the Data Lake.
zData’s familiarity with the many tools strengths and limitations make them an ideal choice for implementing your own Data Lake for both enterprise and industrial enterprise solutions. Their process allows for an initial design review, tools training, architecture, collaboration, exploration, and testing. From there, you are moved into data discovery and deployment which includes several rounds of user testing and tools testing. This tiered process allows zData to pull and reuse the data necessary to generate usable results. To learn more view zData’s Data Lake Enterprise Solutions – Pilot Program, 12 week Quickstart, and Custom Solution packages.