Storage’ new best friend is an elephant?

You can store “nearly half of the entire written works of mankind, from the beginning of recorded history” on EMC’s new Greenplum Analytics Workbench.

Holy “BIG Data”…and crazy to think it’s for testing purposes only. Yep, 24 Petabytes (24,000 Terabytes) of storage dedicated to improving the implementation of the Big Data world’s (and hard drive’s) new best friend: Hadoop.

What a weird name. What is it?  According to hadoop.apache.com, “The Apache Hadoop software library is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using a simple programming model. It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage.” The name? Well, it came from Hadoop creator Doug Cutting, who named it after his son’s toy elephant per wikipedia. Oh, and it’s completely open-source!

So why the huge investment by EMC and its partners like Seagate?

EMC says, “Apache Hadoop has rapidly emerged as the preferred solution for Big Data analytics across unstructured data. Organizations looking for opportunity in an ever-changing business environment are finding that Big Data analysis is the competitive advantage. In fact, according to a 2011 TDWI survey, 34% of companies do big data analytics today, and that number is growing.”

I first talked about BIG Data here, where I said Big data is mostly about understanding what the mountains of data tell us.  Such understanding is what drives the competitive advantage EMC talks about above.  To put it into pictures, just look at this infographic that answers not only how much data we are talking about, but what it’s potentially worth. Through effective use of Big Data, Healthcare alone could see $300 Billion in savings / year, and that’s where EMCs investment in this test system is validated.

It’s all about focusing on the most widely adopted Big Data engine: Hadoop, partnering with industry leaders in hardware and software like Intel, Seagate, Micron, etc., and establishing best practices for doing Big Data right. Creating this testbed and learning from it may just end up saving companies, entire industries, and governments billions of dollars.

And that’s something we all can rally behind…no wonder it’s storage’ new best friend.

Kudos EMC / Greenplum.

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