Structuring big data can be a personal business

If you’re an organisation that uses big data – and most businesses do in 2013 – then you’ll be aware that managing big data can place a huge strain on your systems.

To achieve the full value of big data, it most often needs to be processed in real-time. This requires a lot of computing power which in turn, is best obtained by using bare metal infrastructure. As we’ve discussed recently, a virtual environment simply doesn’t cut it. But if you want additional privacy, or to structure your data in a certain way, then a private cloud on top of a bare metal could be a very potent combination. 

Building a massive database packed full with terabytes of data may seem like the way forward in today’s big data-dominated business landscape. But big data for the sake of big data is not right. We know that huge Hadoop clusters require a powerful computing infrastructure. Given the power hungry nature of Hadoop and the expense of gathering, storing and processing big data, there must be the right balance against the insight big data provides.

Big data infrastructure
A bare metal cloud is the perfect infrastructure for computational heavy big data workloads and ensures that the balance of expense vs. value is maintained. It has the raw computing power required to crunch data fast enough for you to make impactful and timely business decisions.

The key to unlocking the potential of any organisation’s big data is speed and performance and a bare metal cloud delivers on both counts. A number of industry benchmarking studies have compared the performance of bare metal and virtualised infrastructure and the difference in speed can be astonishing.

Taking the public cloud private
So that’s the big data processing covered. But we also know that certain organisations want to structure their data in a certain way or are particularly wary of putting all that data into a public cloud.

Now we believe that a public cloud is as secure and safe as any. Because our servers are physical isolated the security risk associated with virtual environments is removed entirely, with no danger of outside interference at the hardware or hypervisor level. Our machines do not use any shared resources or applications and younger companies on the whole are much more comfortable with the security of a public cloud.

Cloud-in-Cloud capability
But there are people that feel public clouds generally do not provide enough security for their data. So we have enabled Cloud-in-Cloud capability, where customers can use any hypervisor they want to build a private cloud on top of our infrastructure. If required, that private cloud can also be scaled across our network of datacenters.

So we offer customers the best of both worlds – all the big data processing power they could need from our high performance bare metal infrastructure combined with the additional security blanket of a private cloud built on top. What’s not to like!?