Philip Howard on IT-Director.com

Cassandra and Hadoop

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 07:00:00 +0100

I am continuing to investigate Hadoop storage options as I get briefed by more vendors and as new products get released. In this article I want to focus on Cassandra. DataStax is the leading... [Read More...]

CEP and Big Data 2

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 07:00:00 +0100

There have been a couple of things floating around in the ether about CEP (complex event processing) recently. The first is the question, supposedly credited to Curt Monash, of whether it should be... [Read More...]

Another choice for Hadoop

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 07:00:00 +0100

I have written about RainStor previously. Hitherto it has had a single product, what is now known as RainStor Data Retention but it has now announced a second: RainStor Data Analytics for... [Read More...]

Themes for 2012

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 07:00:00 +0100

It's that time of year. Here are a few thoughts about what's to come, in no particular order. Real-time everything. Hardly a surprise. It's been real-time everything for a few years. What I think is... [Read More...]

FATCA and data governance

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 07:00:00 +0100

All the recent compliance headlines in the financial services sector, at least in the UK and Europe, have been around Solvency II, Basel III and MiFid II. A regulation that has been largely... [Read More...]

Simplifying ETL

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 07:00:00 +0100

I have just got back from the Netezza user conference and there was an interesting presentation on using IBM's Information Server in conjunction with Netezza. The major bone of contention during the... [Read More...]

Continuous Business Intelligence and Big Data

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 07:00:00 +0100

I have written previously about how the major vendors of CEP (complex event processing) solutions are still primarily focused on either capital markets or supporting business process and SOA and are... [Read More...]

Hadapt

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 07:00:00 +0100

The latest entry into the BDDB (big data database) market is Hadapt, which has just announced the public beta (it has been in private beta since June) of its eponymous product. What is interesting,... [Read More...]

Governance and Hadoop

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 07:00:00 +0100

Before I start I should say that this is not just about Hadoop but also about all its extensions, distributions, alternatives or replacements. For brevity's sake we need some terminology here so I... [Read More...]

CEP and big data

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 07:00:00 +0100

Red Lambda recently came to market with a new SIEM (security, information and event management) product. Its distinguishing feature is that it has a CEP (complex event processing) engine at the... [Read More...]

Breakthrough and instrumented applications

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 07:00:00 +0100

Breakthrough applications are the flip side of big data. They don't necessarily involve huge amounts of data but they do typically involve some of the same sort of data that is often associated with... [Read More...]

Informix revived

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 07:00:00 +0100

Since IBM acquired Informix there has always been the question of how Informix was positioned versus DB2. The answer that IBM has promulgated has been that Informix was IBM's offering to support... [Read More...]

NoSQL and NewSQL

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 07:00:00 +0100

NoSQL started as an abbreviation for Not SQL and has since morphed into Not Only SQL because vendors have realised that, actually, people rather like SQL and that there are a lot of people with SQL... [Read More...]

IBM and big data: an introduction

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 07:00:00 +0100

IBM probably (almost certainly) has the largest portfolio of products spanning the big data space. It has DB2 (or Smart Analytics Systems), Netezza, Informix, Hadoop (with HDFS) and BigInsights... [Read More...]

Problems with Hadoop

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 07:00:00 +0100

Hadoop sounds great but it has a number of issues associated with it. The first is that there are problems around high availability. In particular, Hadoop has a single NameNode. This is where the... [Read More...]

Another look at big data

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 07:00:00 +0100

In the previous article in this series I discussed what big data is and talked about the ability to query ALL data that is relevant to the organisation. There are several ways to look at this issue.... [Read More...]

What is big data?

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 07:00:00 +0100

Apart from industry hype it's easier to say what big data is not. To begin with it is not Hadoop (see preface to this series: What is Hadoop?). Nor is it simply having lots of data. And especially it... [Read More...]

What is Hadoop?

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 06:00:00 +0100

This is the first of I don't know how many articles about Big Data. I was going to start the first article by saying that big data is not the same as Hadoop but then I realised that I had better... [Read More...]

Informatica Data Replication

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 06:00:00 +0100

Informatica acquired WisdomForce within the last couple of months. WisdomForce was a pure-play provider of data replication solutions. While little known to the world at large, it had around 100... [Read More...]

The data replication market

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 06:00:00 +0100

There are loads of vendors that provide data replication for back-up and recovery purposes but there are not many that (also) target operational and business intelligence environments. For example,... [Read More...]

Data Migration Survey 2011

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 06:00:00 +0100

I have already reported on some of the preliminary results of this year's data migration survey (see www.bloorresearch.com/analysis/11686/data-migration-snippets.html. The full results are now... [Read More...]

Hive, DataRush and Hadoop

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 06:00:00 +0100

Hive provides SQL access to big data stored in Hadoop. However, it is extremely limited. For example only equijoins are supported, neither indexes nor temporal types (dates, timestamps etc) are... [Read More...]

Challenging Cloudera

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 13:00:00 +0100

The market around Hadoop has historically been very gentlemanly. In most cases when open source products become popular you end up with multiple competing distributions. Look at Linux for example.... [Read More...]

The EDW is dead

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 07:00:00 +0100

Often when you see this sort of heading you expect to read something like long live the EDW later in the piece. Not this time. The EDW (enterprise data warehouse) is dead. Period. Like a dodo. Like... [Read More...]

Connexica CXAIR

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 16:00:00 +0100

CXAIR from Connexica (which was previously Ardentia Search) is a BI tool specifically designed to support queries that span both structured and unstructured data, though it can equally well handle... [Read More...]

BI for hybrid (big) data

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 06:00:00 +0100

Most companies exploring the use of big data for business intelligence purposes do not simply want to analyse unstructured data, they also want to combine the results of that analysis with relevant... [Read More...]

Data migration snippets

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 06:00:00 +0100

We have recently completed our 2011 survey of the data migration market. I have not analysed all the data yet and it will be some time before we are ready to publish a full report. In the meantime,... [Read More...]

Disappointed in data governance

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Thu, 05 May 2011 07:00:00 +0100

For the second year in a row I am on the judging panel for the best practice data governance award for the International Data Governance and Information Quality Conference in San Diego in June. As a... [Read More...]

Big data

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Wed, 04 May 2011 07:00:00 +0100

There is a lot of confusion around big data. People naturally assume that big data means lots of data. Which is true. But it isn't any old data or, at least it doesn't have... [Read More...]

Collaborative SIEM solutions

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 06:00:00 +0100

With Infosec taking place next week my thoughts are naturally turning towards the security market in general and SIEM (security information and event management) in particular. Long-time readers will... [Read More...]