Big Data Gets a New Big Standard

One of the more interesting challenges data center architects are going to face over the next year is how to support “big data” initiatives. It’s one thing to maintain a 5 terabyte database; it’s a different story to collect, move, and manage that data.

That why I found it so interesting that the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) just announced the formation of a Data Services Workgroup. The workgroup is being chartered to document the most urgent requirements facing IT in their management of data towards competitive opportunities, with big data being their first focus.

The Data Services Workgroup will initially document usage model requirements towards increasing enterprises’ ability to securely collect, manage and analyze this data. Accelerating enterprise IT’s ability to use database solutions for near-real-time insight into business decisions, and driving interoperability among big data frameworks and traditional business intelligence (BI) solutions, will be the primary objectives of the workgroup.

More practically, the workgroup will create a usage model that will define requirements for addressing security, manageability and interoperability of emerging big data frameworks within traditional data management and data warehouse solutions. The usage models will be available in the second half of 2012.

In part, these usage models will be driven by addressing implementation within enterprise IT environments and the skill sets required to transform business intelligence solutions. Based on the usage models, workgroup members will develop reference architectures and proofs of concept (POCs) for commercial distribution with independent software vendors (ISVs) and OEM partners to test deployments and establish solutions for the enterprise market. The Alliance will also collaborate with the open source community to drive benchmarking suites.

Now if they will only figure out how to replicate 5 terabytes across their WAN…

You can more about the Open Data Center alliance here.