The IT industry sometimes chooses to name concepts and trends badly. ‘Cloud’ is not exactly a label which people love, but at least it captures the nebulous nature of the concept. But the name does not capture the essence cloud computing.
More recently ‘Big Data’ has emerged.
This truly is a poor label which captures only one dimension: size.
None of the potentially clever innovation is conveyed in its name.
The other major reason why people dislike bad names is the association with hype and fads.
Big Data stands out in this respect. Some of the big commercial vendors are literally suggesting that not exploring and pursuing Big Data is a major fault.
Big Data is about:
- Large poorly structured data amounts
- Distributed data and processing
- Cloud based resources
- Analytics
These attributes describe where IT engineering efforts to solve the workloads where traditional IT architectures do not do the job. An often cited use-case are the Web 2.0 providers, who early on engineered their own IT solutions and launched research projects to solve their computational needs.
As more IT resources are deployed into cloud infrastructures, with a desire to perform analystics in numerous locations, IT professionals must understand the innovation that solves their workloads at affordable prices. The majority of IT people will find existing infrastructure will look more traditional for many years to come.
Rainmaker note: We think another label would be more appropriate: Savage Data. This captures more than one attribute and infers that data needs to be controlled.
That the storage vendors latched onto Big Data as a hype generator was predictable. It is a shame that this next-big-thing will serve to annoy many customers. There may of course be a technology transfer that find its way into general IT, but for the time being those vendors who do cater for Big Data will be banging their big drum.
Image credit: grahamtaylor