Bigstep Launches Data Lake-as-a-Service

The Full Metal Data Lake is the first commercially available Data Lake as a service offering in the market, announced by big data focused cloud provider Bigstep Cloud Ltd.

Priced at £0.018 for one gigabyte of raw data stored per month, the Full Metal Data Lake is an active storage solution that can ingest large volumes of structured and unstructured data, and make them available for processing by a multitude of applications, including enterprise data warehouses or open source technologies such as Apache Hadoop or Spark. It is available in company’s Full Metal Cloud, an cloud purpose built for big data.

The Full Metal Data Lake can be used as a standalone solution for active storage, or it can be integrated with on premise infrastructure, as well as with any application or service in the Full Metal cloud ecosystem. The service can be activated instantly, and requires no configuration or minimum commitment.

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Key features of Full Metal Data Lake are:

• It can store files of any type or size
  This includes structured data, such as data base exports from existing enterprise data warehouses, but also unstructured data like: clickstream, social media streams, images, video and audio, machine data, sensor data, scanned documents, CRM and ERP data.

• Data can be continuously streamed in or imported in batches.

• Data stored can be processed in any application
  The Full Metal Data Lake is natively HDFS compatible and integrates with most big data, business intelligence, and data science tools such as: Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, most NoSQL data bases (Couchbase, Cassandra, Redis), Elasticsearch, Solr, Qlik, Tableau, R. It is compatible and can import or export data into most enterprise data warehouse solutions.

• Data is encrypted in transit and at rest
  All files are encrypted in transit and at rest, in order to ensure enterprise-grade data privacy standards are met by the Full Metal Data Lake. Furthermore, data can be imported or exported via encrypted tunnels or SSL connections.

• File level snapshotting and replication, across regions
  Individual snapshotting and replication rules can be set at the file or directory level. As a result, business critical or performance sensitive files can be replicated multiple times for HA and throughput, while colder data can have lower replication factors.

Files can currently be replicated in both availability regions of the Full Metal Cloud (UK and Germany), and a third, US region, will follow later in the year.

With the launch of the Full Metal Data Lake, the company has announced it will be offering its first 100 users the possibility to permanently store 1TB of data for free.