EMC on March 23 introduced a reconfigured big data package for enterprise IT that incorporates a set of existing components from around its own corporate perimeter.
Called EMC Federation Business Data Lake, the hardware and software solution from EMC, Pivotal and VMware ostensibly will enable organizations to securely deploy big data workloads at scale across an enterprise.
Data lakes are a now-popular marketing term that describes large single pools of data that can be accessed by virtually anybody inside an enterprise. These highly scalable repositories for storing structured and unstructured data from a wide variety of sources are generated by traditional and next-generation complex workloads and are used by a range of mechanisms without needing to be managed by separate, multiple silos of storage.
Capitalizing on big data analytics and building out a robust data lake can be difficult and complex, requiring changes in people, process, data and technology, EMC Strategic Big Data Initiative Senior Director Aidan O’Brien told eWEEK.
The EMC Data Lake aims to remove integration barriers, allowing organizations to ingest, store, analyze, surface and act faster on big data sets. The solution features integration and interoperability with often-used analytics platforms, including SAS, Tableau and others, and also supports customer choice of Hadoop distribution, including Cloudera and Hortonworks.
For organizations new to big data or those looking to scale existing investments, the Federation Business Data Lake solution recommends data based on past behaviors and offers it up in a consumable way, delivering insight to both people and applications to enable timely decisions and actions, O’Brien said.
A full suite of services and education programs will be made available with the solution in order to help customers at every point, O’Brien said. The EMC Federation Business Data Lake will be available in April 2015 in select countries, he said.