IBM announces new big data technologies

• BLU Acceleration combines a number of techniques to improve analytical performance and simplify administration
• New IBM PureData System for Hadoop designed to make it easier and faster to deploy Hadoop in the enterprise

IBM has announced new technologies designed to help companies and governments tackle ‘big data’ by making it simpler, faster and more economical to analyze massive amounts of data.
 
New data acceleration innovation results in as much as 25 times faster reporting and analytics, the company said in a statement.

As organizations grapple with a flood of structured and unstructured data generated by computers, mobile devices, sensors and social networks, they're under unprecedented pressure to analyze much more data at faster speeds and at lower costs to help deepen customer relationships, prevent threat and fraud, and identify new revenue opportunities, IBM said.

The new announcement includes an innovation called "BLU Acceleration" which combines a number of techniques to dramatically improve analytical performance and simplify administration, the company claimed.

Also announced was the new IBM PureData System for Hadoop, designed to make it easier and faster to deploy Hadoop in the enterprise.
 
Hadoop is the open-source software used to organize and analyze vast amounts of structured and unstructured data, such as posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, online transaction records, and cellphone location data.

The new system can reduce from weeks to minutes the ramp-up time organizations need to adopt enterprise-class Hadoop technology with powerful, easy-to-use analytic tools and visualization for both business analysts and data scientists.
 
In addition, it provides enhanced big data tools for monitoring, development and integration with many more enterprise systems, IBM claimed.
 
BLU Acceleration enables users to have much faster access to key information, leading to better decision-making.  The software extends the capabilities of traditional in-memory systems -- which allow data to be loaded into Random Access Memory instead of hard disks for faster performance -- by providing in-memory performance even when data sets exceed the size of the memory.
 
Innovations in BLU Acceleration include ‘data skipping,’ which allows the ability to skip over data that doesn't 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.
 
Another industry-first advance in BLU Acceleration is called ‘actionable compression,’ where data no longer has to be decompressed to be analyzed.
 
IBM PureData System for Hadoop integrates IBM InfoSphere BigInsights, 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.

Also announced were new versions of IBMs big data solutions:

• A new version of InfoSphere BigInsights, IBM’s enterprise-ready Hadoop offering, which  makes it simpler to develop applications using existing SQL skills, compliance security and high availability features vital for enterprise applications.

• A new version of InfoSphere Streams, unique ‘stream computing’ software that enables massive amounts of data in motion to be analyzed in real-time, with performance improvements, and simplified application development and deployment.

• A new version of Informix including TimeSeries Acceleration for operational reporting and analytics on smart meter and sensor data.

All offerings would be available in Q2 2013, except the PureData System for Hadoop, which will start shipping to customers in the second half 2013.
 
For more information about IBM, go here.
 
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