In this blog I try to examine the concepts behind Cloud Computing and Moore's Law and how it has affected the world of Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence via a few examples.
What is Moore's Law?
It states that until some kind of wall is reached in the current progression of computer capabilities, there will continue to be drastic growth in the computer capabilities area. Moore found that computer power and cost are inversely related. The simplified version of this law states that processor speeds, or overall processing power for computers will double every two years.
The economics of data warehousing, significantly different today, is intervening to change the picture entirely. Managing from scarcity has given way to a rush to find the insight from large volumes of data. Most companies are taking a step towards constructing their data warehouse to store and monitor real time data as well as historical data that can be extracted for quick and accurate decision making. It is understood that data warehouse and business intelligence (BI) platforms are complex and create multiple challenges. But, the costs to compute and store with respect to DW and BI platforms has been decreasing exponentially as per Moore’s Law.
What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud Computing is anything that involves delivering hosted services over the internet. In other words we do not have any more headache of maintaining the hardware or the software. It is basically sold on demand. You only pay for what you use. Clouds can be classified as public, private or hybrid. Basically, cloud treats computing as a utility rather than specific product or technology.
With so many big players in IT providing cloud services, the time to provision even moderately complex environments can be reduced to under an hour, with entry-level costs at less than one dollar per hour. However, cloud-based environments for big data analytics, or more specifically, data warehousing analytics for structured data, are not appropriate for all use cases.
Let's have a look at a few vendors of cloud computing in DW/BI sphere
Amazon Redshift
The Amazon Redshift is a great example of moving to the cloud. Redshift is a fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse solution that makes it simple and cost-effective to efficiently analyze all your data using existing business intelligence tools. It is optimized for data warehousing as it uses a variety of innovations to obtain very high performance on data sets ranging in size from a hundred gigabytes to a petabyte or more. It is scalable.
Snowflake
The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse is a new data warehouse built from the ground up for the cloud. Its patent-pending architecture decouples data storage from compute, making it uniquely able to take advantage of the elasticity, scalability and flexibility of the cloud. As a native relational database with full support for standard SQL, Snowflake empowers any analyst with self-service access to data, which enables organizations to take advantage of the tools and skills that they already have.
Teradata
Its Aster Cloud Edition offers big data analytics on demand by bringing in the flexibility and agility of cloud computing. The massive parallel analytics engine stores and processes big data to offer performance and scalability. This edition takes full advantage of scalability and elasticity of cloud computing.
The Data Warehouse as a Service provides access to Teradata Database, ETL and BI ecosystems, managed by Teradata, in a secure and reliable production class environment in the cloud. Teradata says it assumes responsibility for the hardware/software and daily end-to-end operations via Teradata Managed Services.
Real World Implementations
FourSquare
The location based social app has 40 million users. It streams hundreds of millions of application logs each day. It's database system required a lot of staff time to keep it running and high annual licensing costs. By migrating to Redshift and Tableau, Foursquare could expose its analytics platform to a larger number of their employees and save tens of thousands in licensing costs.
Comcast
Comcast the world’s leading media, entertainment and communications companies. It serves 24 million cable subscribers, runs 300 TV channels including 150 HD and provides 150,000 online entertainment choices. Comcast claims that Teradata saves them time in design phase where requirement input is lacking. Under the supervision of Teradata, Comcast decided to re-architect data warehouse from scratch. With the holistic view of data produced and consumed it provides a bigger picture of future.
Verizon
The largest wireless carrier in the United States with the lowest churn rate has employed Unified Data Architecture to 'listen' to its 100 million customers. This innovative Teradata Warehouse strategy together with Aster Discovery Platform and Hadoop Verizon Wireless has helped the organization gain valuable insights for better customer service.
References:
http://www.teradata.com
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/the-era-of-cloud-computing/?_r=1
http://aws.amazon.com/redshift/
http://www.snowflake.net/news/snowflake-reinvents-the-data-warehouse-for-the-cloud/
http://www.teradata.com/business-needs/business-intelligence/?ICID=Sbi&LangType=1033&LangSelect=true
http://www.vertica.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/GigaOM-New-economies-of-enterprise-data-warehousing.pdf
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
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