IBM recently announced its new Big Data offering called BLU Acceleration. Along with the software offering, the company also introduced its PureData System for Hadoop. The company believes that the two technologies will help enterprises handle big data requirements faster, and in a more economical manner.
BLU Acceleration is designed to enable users to have much faster access to key information, leading to better decision-making. According to IBM, the software extends the capabilities of traditional in-memory systems by providing in-memory performance even when data sets exceed the size of the memory. The company claims that during testing, some queries in a typical analytics workload were more than 1000 times faster when using the combined innovations of BLU Acceleration.
The solution includes innovative features such as data skipping, which gives the ability to skip data that does not need to be analyzed, such as duplicate information; the ability to analyze data in parallel across different processors; and greater ability to analyze data transparently to the application, without the need to develop a separate layer of data modeling. BLU Accleration features another technology advancement called ‘actionable compression’, where data no longer has to be decompressed to be analyzed.
Along with the in-memory approach to big data, IBM has also taken the Hadoop route with the PureData System for Hadoop. The solution is designed to make it easier and faster to deploy Hadoop in the enterprise. The new system promises to reduce the ramp-up time organizations need to adopt enterprise-class Hadoop technology from weeks to minutes. In addition, the solution also provides enhanced big data tools for monitoring, development and integration with many more enterprise systems.
This new system integrates the company’s InfoSphere BigInsights offering, which allows companies of all sizes to cost-effectively manage and analyze data and add administrative, workflow, provisioning and security features, along with best-in-class analytical capabilities from IBM Research.
“Big data is about using all data in context at the point of impact,” said Jaskiran Bhatia, Country Manager, Information Management IBM India/ South Asia. “With the innovations we are delivering, now every organization can realize value quickly by leveraging existing skills as well as adopt new capabilities for speed and exploration to improve business outcomes.”
Along with the two new technologies, the company also announced new versions of InfoSphere BigInsights, InfoSphere Streams and Informix.
The solutions will be available in Q2, except for the PureData System for Hadoop, which will start shipping to customers in the second half 2013.