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Big data technology is a big deal for storage shops, and a clear understanding of what it means -- and doesn't mean -- is required to successfully configure storage for big data apps. I love the idea of changing the world through big data technology. Big data promises we'll all be IT superheroes just by storing more raw data than ever before and then using parallel processing techniques to yield great new insights that will catapult our company to the top. Good storage is costly and the rate that interesting new data is produced increases daily, but the Apache Hadoop product calls for leveraging scale-out commodity server nodes with cheap local disk. Of course, there's more to it. Conceptually, big data products bring new ways to store and analyze the mountains of data that we used to discard. There's certainly information and insight to be mined, but the definitions are fuzzy, the hype is huge and the mining technologies themselves are still rapidly evolving. Adding to the confusion, big data technology has been ...