Red Hat Big Data

Open source vendor Red Hat announces a Big Data strategy that spans the full enterprise software stack, both in the public cloud and on-premise.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is arguably Raleigh, North Carolina-based Red Hat's flagship product, but the operating system arena is not by any means its only focus.  Red Hat also has big irons in the storage, cloud and developer fires, and its Big Data strategy announcement addressed all three of these.  Big Data is now a relevant factor in the entire enterprise software stack.

Red Hat rightly pointed out that the majority of Big Data projects are built on open source software (including Linux, Hadoop, and various NoSQL databases) and so it's fitting that such an important company in the open source world as Red Hat would announce its Big Data strategy.

Red Hat big data components are illustrated in the attached system diagram.

Big Data Fourth Dimension

We knew that Big Data has 3 pillars namely Volume, Velocity and Variety.  I learnt a new (4th) dimension namely Veracity.  What does it mean?  Accuracy: conformity with truth or fact (or) truthfulness: devotion to the truth.

1. Volume:
Enterprises are awash with ever-growing data of all types, easily amassing terabytes—even petabytes—of information.

• Turn 12 terabytes of Tweets created each day into improved product sentiment analysis
• Convert 350 billion annual meter readings to better predict power consumption

2. Velocity
Sometimes 2 minutes is too late. For time-sensitive processes such as catching fraud, big data must be used as it streams into your enterprise in order to maximize its value.

• Scrutinize 5 million trade events created each day to identify potential fraud
• Analyze 500 million daily call detail records in real-time to predict customer churn faster

3. Variety
Big data is any type of data - structured and unstructured data such as text, sensor data, audio, video, click streams, log files and more. New insights are found when analyzing these data types together.

• Monitor 100’s of live video feeds from surveillance cameras to target points of interest
• Exploit the 80% data growth in images, video and documents to improve customer satisfaction

4. Veracity
1 in 3 business leaders don’t trust the information they use to make decisions. How can you act upon information if you don’t trust it? Establishing trust in big data presents a huge challenge as the variety and number of sources grows.