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Analytics: time to get real

Editorial Type: Opinion     Date: 07-2013    Views: 2748   





Michael Bradley, VP Operations & Technology Services EMEA, at Violin Memory examines how emerging storage technologies can support the increasing demand for Real-Time Analytics

There is a rising demand for real-time data processing and, for a growing number of businesses today, this capability is paramount to their success. The driving forces behind this are twofold: first, the increasing expectation for information to be readily available at our fingertips, such as a bank balance on a mobile phone or social media channels, has rendered real-time data delivery essential to businesses of all sorts. Second, companies need to conduct instant forecasting and trend analysis based on high volumes of complex data, and in no sector is this need for speed of delivery, reliability and actionable data greater than in finance and banking.

Instant data delivery is often the Holy Grail for a financial organisation where even a miniscule delay in this process can have an operational and even financial impact; yet many are still using disk-based storage platforms and are struggling to achieve the necessary performance. The right technology here is one that will allow users to carry out thousands of transactions simultaneously and very rapidly, for example pulling data from a multiplicity of sources to turn it into meaningful and actionable data. This requires vast datasets to be read from storage systems, analysed and placed back onto the storage in near real-time. Traditional spinning disks are simply too slow and more and more businesses in the financial space are finding that no matter how much additional capacity they provide, the performance is simply not there. As a result data queries are not carried out at the desired speed, with a detrimental effect on user productivity or customer experience.

Flash, or memory-based storage, on the other hand, has become increasingly appealing to banks, insurers and other financial organisations thanks to its blend of speed, reliability and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). This technology is able to deliver 150 microseconds at 4GB/s and has a 95 per cent lower latency than disk drives, resulting in an accelerated analytics cycle, quicker insights and the ability to transform data from a technical problem into a business opportunity.

While analysing information has been mission critical to financial institutions for several decades, the volumes of data put under the microscope today are growing on an unprecedented scale. It is generally accepted that in a single day we create 2.5 quintillion bytes, or one trillion eight-hundred-and-forty billion GBs of data; so much that 90 per cent of the data in the world today was created in the last two years alone. Furthermore, businesses are not just dealing with structured datasets as they were in the past; instead, available information has become unstructured and far more complex and is often derived from numerous sources, rendering its interpretation evermore challenging.

Turning multiple and complex datasets, or Big Data, into meaningful information has become one of the biggest business challenges of our times. Companies within the financial markets for example, are continually seeking out solutions to assist them in understanding trading lifecycles, strategy execution and post-trade processing. These insights are critical to performance and staying ahead of the competition.

Analysing Big Data is essential for many organisations, but in the financial sector there is another mission-critical dimension: timing. Rapid interpretation of data, which is ever-growing in volume, the speed it is generated at and its types, requires new levels of performance unattainable with legacy technologies. Flash-based storage allows users to sort, analyse and store data in near real-time, meaning that even the largest volumes can be turned into meaningful information in a matter of hours, while they are still valuable, and well ahead of competitors relying on traditional disk drive technology. It's astonishing to see how many legacy infrastructures built to cope with the demands of the last century are still in use today. Changing to new technologies can seem time consuming, resource intensive and expensive, but it can still make more sense than throwing more of the same (product) at a problem. Our requirements have changed and grown to meet the challenges presented by today's business dynamics and so too has technology. As they say, there are no old paths to new destinations.
More info: www.violin-memory.com

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