The Third Platform Will Impact Data Backup and Recovery Procedures

The Third Platform is having an impact on Information Technology department processes and procedures at an accelerated rate. This is while there is still not a clear distinction of the elements of the Third Platform. The Open Group is identifying a set of new platform capabilities, and architecting and standardizing an IT platform by which enterprises can reap the business benefits of Open Platform 3.0. While the elements of the Third Platform are still being clarified, there is little doubt that the platform is here now.Third Platform

The trends of the Third Platform are generally known to be;

  • Mobility
  • Social networks and social enterprise
  • Big data analytics
  • Cloud computing
  • The Internet of Things

The post The Emergence of the Third Platform states “The emergence of the third generation of enterprise platforms is manifested at the crossroads of four distinct, almost simultaneous, disruptive technology shifts; cloud computing, mobile computing, big data-based analytics and the IoT. The use of applications based on these technologies, such as social media and business-driven insight systems, have contributed to both the convergence and rate of adoption.”

SAP may be further blurring the lines of these trends as they role out SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud. Where Big Data was considered to be the platform for Analytics, SAP is implementing HANA for Big Data mission-critical transactional applications as well as analytics delivered from the Cloud. In concert with technology trends and market needs, IBM Continues T0 Expand Its Cloud Offering. IBM announced that it is bringing a greater level of control, security and flexibility to cloud-based application development and delivery with a single-tenant version of Bluemix, IBM’s platform-as-a-service.

Data Backup and Recovery is just one of the IT processes that will need to be reviewed as the Third Platform further develops. Advanced considerations must be incorporated in strategic plans and day-to-day procedures. However, if an organization is not staffed or tooled to design and execute a backup strategy of this level of complexity, there are Data Backup/Recovery Managed Service Providers (DB/R MSP) that provide remote management of the Backup process, along with professional Disaster Backup and Recovery consultation. A company should look to a service provider that specializes in complex backup strategies while leaving the IT staff time to manage their daily and long-term strategic activities.

 

The Internet of Things Creates the Demand for Big Data Solutions

The Internet of Things (IoT) is generating a demand for the management of Big Data. There is a need for data from specialized devices and applications be made available to business applications for increased corporate value.  Businesses are integrating these specialized devices and applications with core business processes for analytics and advanced business processing. This data is a mix of varied data types and has now become corporate data. This complex data creates the demand for new technology.

HadoopHadoop has arrived to answer the challenge. The global market revenue, which was estimated at $2.0 billion in 2013, is rapidly expanding and may grow up to a staggering $50.2 billion by 2020.

While Hadoop is offering answers to the need to handle Big Data, Hadoop requires skills and training. Finding those human resources can be challenging. Another issue is to be able to backup Big Data for the purpose of regulatory requirements or recovery of a catastrophic event.

A Big Data implementation using Hadoop presents a need for even more focus on the ability to recover from a catastrophic event quickly. However, the SMB is not often staffed or tooled to design and execute a backup strategy of this level of complexity.  The other consideration is that since the attractiveness of Hadoop is to use local servers, there is a further need to implement a data backup and recover strategy that can be managed remotely but not have a requirement that the live data be transferred to or running in a cloud environment.

There are Data Backup/Recovery Managed Service Providers (DB/R MSP) that provide remote management of the Backup process, along with professional Disaster Backup and Recovery consultation. Contracting an DB/R MSP with the model of remote DB/R management allows the SMB to maintain their data locally without the need to hire new staff or train existing staff in sophisticated data backup and recovery processes. Additionally, the SMB can have a comprehensive Data Backup and Recovery strategy while housing their Big Data locally.

Data Backup and Recovery Considerations for Hadoop and Big Data

IBM says that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. IBM  also says that 80% of data captured today is unstructured. Sources of unstructured data are, among others, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, point-of-sale systems. All of this unstructured data can be termed as Big Data.

Salvus Data ConsultantsBecause of the wide-ranging benefits that small and medium size businesses can gain from Big Data in today’s competitive world, many are implementing a local Big Data strategy. To help businesses of all sizes manage Big Data, there is Hadoop. The Hadoop software library is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using a simple programming model. It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage.

The Hadoop project has various elements. Below are a few of the more pertinent :

  • Hadoop Common – libraries and utilities
  • Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) – a distributed file-system that stores data on commodity servers while providing high aggregate bandwidth across the cluster.
  • Hadoop MapReduce – The “Map” step takes the input, divides it into smaller sub-problems, and distributes them to worker nodes.  The worker node processes the smaller problem, and passes it to its master node. The “Reduce” step then collects the answers to all the sub-problems and combines them to form the output.

As stated by Nathan Coutinho in his CDW Blog article  5 Ways to Future-Proof Your Data Center for Big Data “The whole point of Hadoop is to keep the data local on commodity servers and economical local storage…”

Small and Medium size businesses find Hadoop attractive because of it ability to provide high availability to data on local commodity servers.

A data strategy is never complete without a Data Backup and Recovery strategy. A Big Data implementation using Hadoop presents a need for even more focus on the ability to recover from a catastrophic event quickly. However, the SMB is not often staffed or tooled to design and execute a backup strategy of this level of complexity.  The other consideration is that since the attractiveness of Hadoop is to use local servers, there is a further need to implement a data backup and recover strategy that can be managed remotely but not have a requirement that the live data be transferred to or running in a cloud environment.

There are Data Backup/Recovery Managed Service Providers (DB/R MSP) that provide remote management of the Backup process, along with professional Disaster Backup and Recovery consultation. Contracting an DB/R MSP with the model of remote DB/R management allows the SMB to maintain their data locally without the need to hire new staff or train existing staff in sophisticated data backup and recovery processes. Additionally, the SMB can have a comprehensive Data Backup and Recovery strategy while housing their Big Data locally.