What a busy, exciting June it has been at Syncsort! It started with CIO magazine featuring comScore, and their use of our DMExpress data integration software, in an article on taming Big Data. Mike Brown, comScore’s superstar CTO, says that Syncsort’s software made their Hadoop migration a piece of cake and is playing a central role in helping the company save 75 terabytes of data storage a month. Now that translates into BIG savings!
Next up was Hadoop Summit in San Jose where we formally announced our partnership with Hortonworks as well as DMExpress certification for the new Hortonworks Data Platform. If you haven’t already had the chance to check them out, I highly recommend the event recaps that my colleagues Tendu Yogurtcu and Keith Kohl checked in with right here on the Syncsort blog. The cherry on top of Hadoop Summit was Syncsort’s Vice President of Marketing and Product Management Mitch Seigle appearing on “The Cube” with Wikibon’s Jeff Kelly and SiliconANGLE’s John Furrier. It is well worth watching the entire segment, but we’ll soon be making available shorter clips of some of the top highlights.
Finally, we announced this week that Syncsort has joined the Greenplum Catalyst Developer Program and that DMExpress is now certified for high-performance loading of Greenplum Database. There was a lot of excitement and great coverage of the news. In fact, ZDNet blogger Andrew Brust took notice of Syncsort’s big month and Big Data 1-2 punch.
While it is always nice to head into the summer months of July and August with momentum, we aren’t finished yet. We have a lot of exciting things going on and it will be well worth your while to stay tuned.
We continue our celebration of Backup Awareness Month with the third of our new video blogs. In the previous two, we covered the backup side of things with “Enabling Faster Backups” and “Backup in the Era of Big Data.” Today we begin talking about the recovery side, specifically the use of snapshot technology. In this blog I address three simple questions:
How does snapshot technology work? A 45 second primer.
Why haven’t snapshots taken off just yet as a data protection technique? The market view.
How does Syncsort expand the use of snapshots? The secret sauce!
Steve Duplessie at Enterprise Strategy Group recently posted a video blog entitled “The Future of Single Platform Backup Tools.” As is Steve’s way, he doesn’t mince words and he makes big statements. It’s definitely worth the five minutes it takes to watch. Here I’m going to pull two quotes and comment on them, but check out the whole thing to get the full context.
Steve D: Data growth causes all of our problems. It eventually breaks every single process, procedure and product that you have on your floor.
Leave it to Steve to lay it on the line. Data growth changes everything, and perhaps backup and recovery most of all. I recently posted some video thoughts of my own on this, which you can see here.
Steve D (talking about purpose-built backup tools for VMs): People want another vendor in their shop like they want a hole in their head.
Classic Steve! He makes the point that users were driven to purpose-built, VM-only backup tools at first because the conventional backup vendors (you know the names) failed miserably out of the gate on VM backup. At Syncsort, we were VM friendly before anybody even had VMs, because from the start our NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup solution focused on reducing backup impact and dramatically limiting the amount of data that gets backed up. That’s the problem with VM backup: too much backup impact, not enough free system resources. Syncsort solved that problem back in 2005 when it first integrated its block-level backup with NetApp storage as a backup target (supports any primary storage, by the way).
I wrote more about this a year ago, ironically in another blog post inspired by Steve D. (Ok, I admit it, I just read what Steve says and piggy back!)
Steve goes on to make the point that organizations are looking for data protection solutions that deliver everything they need. I couldn’t agree more, and we’re finding users responding to our NSB solution because we bring it all to the table: support for physical and virtual machines; application integration; backup to disk with built-in support for tape; integrated disaster recovery and ROBO support. It’s all in there, as they say.
P.S. – Steve has one of the best (and funniest) Twitter feeds in the biz. Follow him @stevedupe.
Senior Director, Software Development - Data Integration
Last week’s Hadoop Summit brought together thought leaders from the Big Data ecosystem around a comprehensive agenda. Hosted by Hortonworks and Yahoo, the event was extremely well organized and it was powerful to see more than 2,100 attendees and 50 sponsors come together, a strong validation of the growing interest in collaborating to help better define the next-generation data platform.
The overarching message for Hadoop Summit 2012 was about bringing communities together to establish a robust Big Data ecosystem for making Hadoop “enterprise ready.” The definition of community is no longer limited to open source; it is inclusive of vendors and end users. In fact, there were several sessions that specifically highlighted the need for robust data platform services and open APIs to enable vendors to integrate with open source software.
In his keynote, Hortonworks VP of Strategy Shaun Connelly mentioned that the Big Data market is estimated at $100 billion in a recent Bank of America Merrill Lynch report, with about $14 billion of that sized for Hadoop. Furthermore, more than half of the world’s data is predicted to be touched or processed by Apache Hadoop by the end of 2015.
Not surprisingly, a major inhibitor for Hadoop adoption continues to be the inability to use existing IT skills. Enterprise adoption will require companies to leverage the investments that they have already made, and IT organizations to be comfortable and confident with the solutions. In this context, Syncsort has a lot to offer with a proven track record across thousands of data integration customers for its high performance, ease of use and low TCO. DMExpress is a great complement to the Big Data solutions stack.
Geoffrey Moore, best-selling author of Crossing the Chasm, was the keynote for the second day of the Hadoop Summit. He highlighted that consumer IT redefines the user experience, creating a disruption with enterprise IT on hold and consumer IT on fire. He described the Big Data business opportunity for companies that can “respect the demands of the enterprise and are fully committed to the user experience.” Companies with a vision to optimize business solutions instead of optimizing technologies will be poised to seize a big share of the Big Data market.
As my colleague Keith Kohl pointed out in his blog post on Hadoop Summit, it was a great week for Syncsort. We are very excited to be part of the Big Data technology adoption curve and what promises to be a game-changing decade!
