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Access "Helluva lot of data"

Rich Castagna, Editorial Director Published: 18 Oct 2012
Best storage products of the year

This article is part of the Vol. 10 Num. 12 February 2012 issue of Best storage products of the year

All data isn’t big data, and dealing with it requires a variety of data storage technologies and disciplines. For a long time, I felt like I was the only person who was confused about this “big data” thing. I thought it meant dealing with large files, but the term also seemed to be tossed around in equal doses to refer to lots and lots of pieces of unstructured data. I think I get it now. It means both things, but it doesn’t refer to everything in between, which is probably 90% of the data stored in most data centers. But, to be fair, the 10% that’s some form of big data can be pretty important stuff. If you manage to parse these things out, they start to make some sense. Not the kind of sense storage marketers are trying to hypnotize us with by relentlessly pairing big data with “the cloud,” “virtualization,” “solid-state storage” and whatever buzzword du jour they think (or hope) describes their product lines. That’s nonsense. But if you put the 90% of data aside for a moment and look at the two big data constituencies, there’s something of substance to ... Access >>>

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