IceWeb Says to Bring Affordable Big Data Manegeability to SMEs

IceWEB, Inc. announced readily available solutions to mid-market enterprise organizations’ big data challenges with its Unified Data Storage Appliances.

IDC defines big data technologies as "a new generation of technologies and architectures designed to extract value economically from very large volumes of a wide variety of data by enabling high-velocity capture, discovery, and/or analysis."

While data storage has traditionally served as a place for structured and unstructured data to rest, big data enables organizations to apply analytical applications such as business intelligence across all the organization’s data, increasing productivity and the value of an organization’s critical information assets.

IceWEB’s Unified Data Storage Appliances address big data challenges not only for enterprises where big data challenges are most prevalent, but also for mid-sized organizations facing the same challenges, but on a smaller scale and with tighter IT budgets and fewer resources to harness the staggering amount of data companies are producing.

Gartner Group analyst Doug Laney characterizes big data challenges across as being driven by three primary factors, including ever-increasing data volumes, velocity (speed of data in/out), and variety (range of data types, sources).

IceWEB’s abilities to address
mid-market big data challenges include:

• Scalability – from IceWEB’s entry-level 4TB IceWEB 2000 appliance to its multi-petabyte IceWEB 6000 systems
• Unified – able to handle the range of data types and sources over various storage protocols
• Speed – hybrid disk pooling between high performance SSD to high capacity SAS drives, combined with IceWEB’s IceCAP Cache Acceleration Protocol
• Cloud enabled – with replication capabilities to combine disparate databases into a centralized data center for business intelligence spanning enterprise wide data
• Manageability – automated storage tiering, thin provisioning, and multiple levels of physical and logical data protection
• Affordability – benefits of a SAN without the prohibitive big vendor costs that have kept mid-market organizations from realizing the benefits of centralized manageability of storage resources from a single pane of glass

"With IceWEB’s highly manageable, scalable and affordable unified storage systems, mid-market organizations can harness big data to achieve the benefits of business intelligence and enterprise analytics," said Steven Toole, chief marketing officer at IceWEB. "While big data in the mid market may not be of the scale and proportion of big data in the Fortune 5000, mid-market organizations are equally dependent on leveraging their information assets to make intelligent decisions. IceWEB will continue to develop and refine its big data offerings, including several key technology alliances currently in development which will be announced later this year."

IceWEB is already working with mid-market companies and government agencies to enable big data initiatives using Cloudera’s Apache Hadoop file system.

In the first growth forecast of the worldwide market for big data technology and services, IDC projects a $16.9 billion spend as compared to an estimated $3.2 billion in 2010 – a 40% compound annual growth rate. Released on March 7, 2012, the report entitled Worldwide big data Technology and Services 2012-2015 Forecast estimates that 61.4% of the spend on big data solutions will be on storage, emphasizing the increasing importance of system performance, availability, security, manageability, and cloud integration of storage appliances.

"While software and services make up the bulk of the market opportunity through 2015, infrastructure technology for big data deployments is expected to grow slightly faster at 44% CAGR. Storage, in particular, shows the strongest growth opportunity, growing at 61.4% CAGR through 2015," said Benjamin S. Woo, program vice president, Storage Systems at IDC. "The significant growth rate in revenue is underscored by the large number of new open source projects that drive infrastructure investments."

IceWEB’s unified data storage systems are available to help mid-enterprise organizations address their big data challenges through network of channel partners throughout North America.