Dell Storage Supports Big Data Analytics

As customers face the increasing deluge of big data driven by business demands for greater analytics, Dell Inc. is introducing a big data retention solution that can reduce the costs of retaining big data while helping to improve management for easy retrieval and analysis.

It is designed for organizations that leverage big data analytics to derive business value from their data. The solution integrates with existing analytics platforms as a frontend big data repository for large datasets or a backend archive. It can also serve as a standalone repository or as an analytics platform with Hadoop.

With this latest offering, Dell expands its portfolio of big data capabilities across the spectrum of ingest, storage, management, warehousing, and analytics. Customers can scale from efficient storage and retention, into more complex analytics like the Dell Cloudera management platform, Apache Hadoop Solutions based on Dell PowerEdge C- and R-series servers, Force 10 networks, and Dell Crowbar deployment toolkit.

The solution combines Dell storage, including the DX Object Storage Platform, and RainStor, Inc.‘s database technology, to help reduce the cost of retaining big data through data reduction, simplified data management and near-perfect scalability, which can provide access to the data by standard SQL BI/analytics tools. The solution also includes Dell professional services to help customers enhance their current big data environment or create a new one that can scale to company demands and data growth.

Much of the anticipated massive data growth is tied to automated systems that continuously create structured or semi-structured data that can be mined by data analytic programs to drive new discoveries and save money. The further adoption of big data analytics will ultimately place enormous demands on IT to change the way data is stored and managed.

"Not only are the volumes of data growing – so is its value to the organization," said Darren Thomas, VP and GM, Dell Enterprise Storage. "Being able to cost-effectively capture and store all of the relevant data makes it possible to gain insights that support innovation and business value. The key is having the right data management solution to fluidly move data, tier it, de-dupe it, protect it and archive it. To us, that means your data is fluid."

Dell’s big data retention solution can provide an average data compression ratio of up to 40:1,(figure based on findings through RainStor internal testing) freeing up disk space approximately 97%. This reduced footprint can accelerate query access for analytics. The solution leverages the capabilities of the Dell Fluid Data architecture, which enables these data volumes to be efficiently accessed, moved and leveraged when and where needed.

The RainStor database provides online data retention at a massive scale, with unlimited scalability and zero administration. It can be deployed on any combination of Dell servers and storage, on premise or in a cloud configuration. When paired with the DX Object Storage platform, the solution provides a single system for retaining structured, semi-structured and unstructured data across an unlimited number of data sources, formats and types, providing cost savings.

While available on other Dell storage platforms, when a big data retention solution is added to the DX Object Storage Platform customers can add capacity in amounts as small as 2TB, scaling up to petabytes and to billions of objects without the set-up and management complexity and costs of traditional file and block storage.

Dell’s big data retention solution is available in the U.S.

"Dell’s best-in-class servers and storage are a perfect complement to RainStor’s big data database," said Ramon Chen, VP of product management at RainStor. "With RainStor’s ability to run on any storage platform, customers can choose the combined solution that will meet their business needs at the lowest total operating cost."