Big data – is it much ado about nothing or is it, as it’s hyped to be, the saviour to many an organisation? People are still struggling to come to terms with big data and exactly what it is. Either way, it has certainly established itself as the key technological trend for 2012.

For a variety of reasons, organisations are now gathering and storing more data than ever before. In its raw form, however, data is useless. It is information which is of benefit to a company – thus begging the question, how do you get information from data? Simple: data analysis.

Big data is the process of taking large, complex data sets, which may come from a range of sources and in a variety of formats, and analysing it to extract relevant, tangible information from it. Whether it is garnering greater insight into the behavioural patterns Continue Reading

My first post for 2012 makes me realise we are now one year closer to IDC’s forecast of 35 Zetabytes of data in the world by 2020!  A zetabyte by the way is a 1 with 21 zeros behind it, or…….1 billion terabytes!  Anyway, we are closer to that number.  My friends, that represents far more than just data in files.  It is in email, databases, groupware repositories (e.g. SharePoint, IBM Domino, Documentum, etc.), email, instant message repositories, and did I mention…..email?  The largest of those repositories and most used is probably eMail.  In a normal business day I receive more than 150 emails.  Do I process each and everyone and then delete them or file them accordingly?  No.  Do I have rules to process them and file them accordingly?  Well, some.  Ahem, candidly speaking, very few.  I would say that I am able to probably process 50 to 75 emails on a good day.  This leaves at least 75 emails that will sit in my inbox until I do something with them and then of the others I did look at, 50% of those will sit in my inbox forever and ever unless a policy is put in place to delete them or they are archived.

I am not unusual (well, not at least with regard to my ever-bloating email box.)  I looked over someone’s shoulder the other day and noticed he had 63,000+ Continue Reading

At this time of year, cynics and sceptics pour scorn on Santa and his faithful reindeer, the prancers and dancers of this festive time.  The gauntlet is often laid down as follows.  Santa will visit all those children who want presents from him – in about one billion homes – which he has to visit on Christmas Eve. 

Thankfully, Fermilabs published the calculations some years ago and proved that Santa, travelling at close to the speed of light, would have no problems covering the ground, in 500 seconds, leaving a generous but fleeting 0.15 milliseconds per dwelling to wolf down some sherry and mince pies.  We are of course assuming there is just one Santa, but please note that in Iceland they have 13 Santa Clauses, sons of a horrible mountain hag called Grýla (we leave the re-calculation as an exercise for the reader!).

So what about data?  Let’s think not about boring networks and bandwidth, but something more fantastic: the whole of our digital universe.

The Guardian reported back in 2009 that “At 487bn gigabytes (GB), if the world’s rapidly Continue Reading

In my last posting, I talked about our propensity for keeping all electronic data; commonly referred to as ESI or Electronically Stored Information.  I also talked about having to change our habits that we cannot go on this way forever and ever as there is too much data being created.  Ok, fine.  What do we do about it and why should we?  We have great technology today that virtualizes, shrinks, and de-dups data.  Lady Backup talks a great game in convincing everyone that they need a great backup strategy and talks about very, very impressive technology to achieve this.  And yes, we do all need a good backup strategy.  However, the story as told, still is, “go ahead, keep everything.”  No.  We need a different story.  The amount of data growth is outpacing the rate at which the cost of hardware and technology is reduced each year.  It is also outpacing the rate at which we can use clever technology to reduce the net data size and foot print within the data centre and the environment.  Again I reference Lady Backup and one of her postings as an example of the latter: Google consumed the same amount of power as 200,000 American homes last year to support their data centres.

Ok, not every company is a Google undoubtedly.  However, virtually all organisations are faced with similar challenges.  Organisations cannot continue to throw hardware at this data problem.  They need to throw Continue Reading

By now most of us have heard about the explosion of digital information in our world. It is difficult to grasp when you hear large numbers and words like “zettabyte.”

Zettabyte?! Eek, sounds scary. However, let’s see if I can put this into context for you by giving you an example of fairly common scenario. I call this, “Birth of a Presentation.”

- Email sent to Michael from marketing asking if he can do a presentation at a conference. The email contains an attachment with presentation template to start from.
[Copies of presentation: 2]
- Michael saves template to local drive
[Copies of presentation: 3]
- Email response from Michael to marketing confirming he will do it and immediately Continue Reading