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- Big Data Challenges
Big Data Challenges
Big data has tremendous potential to transform your business and power revolutionary customer experiences. The catch? You have to overcome some pretty big obstacles. Scalability, availability and security are just the tip of the iceberg.
“We still have relational databases in our environment, and we are going to continue using them where they are appropriate. But DataStax definitely solves a problem that relational databases simply cannot do.”– Terrell Deppe, Chief Technology Officer, HealthCare Anytime
What do we mean by big data?
It's not all about volume
You don't have to be an eBay with millions of concurrent users to have big data problems. Industry experts agree that big data involves one or more of the following aspects:
- Velocity – It moves extremely fast through various sources such as online systems, sensors, social media, web clickstream capture, and other channels
- Variety – It’s made of many types of data from many sources – structured and semi-structured, as well as unstructured (think emails, text messages, documents and the like)
- Volume – It may (but not always) involve terabytes to petabytes (and beyond) of data
- Complexity – It must be able to traverse multiple data centers, the cloud and geographical zones
Why big data matters
It helps you compete and win
If you haven't made much use yet of big data, you will. And very soon. The simple truth is that companies who nail their big data strategies outperform the competition. Click image on right to enlarge.
Top big data challenges
Any of these ring a bell?
If you've ever tried to wrangle big data capabilities out of your traditional relational database solution, you already have a pretty good idea of the hurdles you face. Even most NoSQL solutions aren’t up to the task of managing big data efficiently.
Scale.
With big data you want to be able to scale very rapidly and elastically. Whenever and wherever you want. Across multiple data centers and the cloud if need be. You can scale up to the heavens or shard till the cows come home with your father’s relational database systems and never get there. And most NoSQL solutions like MongoDB or HBase have their own scaling limitations.
Performance.
In an online world where nanosecond delays can cost you sales, big data must move at extremely high velocities no matter how much you scale or what workloads your database must perform. The data handling hoops of RDBMS and most NoSQL solutions put a serious drag on performance.
Continuous availability.
When you rely on big data to feed your essential, revenue-generating 24/7 business applications, even high availability is not high enough. Your data can never go down. A certain amount of downtime is built-in to RDBMS and other NoSQL systems.
Workload diversity.
Big data comes in all shapes, colors and sizes. Rigid schemas have no place here; instead you need a more flexible design. You want your technology to fit your data, not the other way around. And you want to be able to do more with all of that data – perform transactions in real-time, run analytics just as fast and find anything you want in an instant from oceans of data, no matter what from that data may take.
Data security.
Big data carries some big risks when it contains credit card data, personal ID information and other sensitive assets. Most NoSQL big data platforms have few if any security mechanisms in place to safeguard your big data.
Manageability.
Staying ahead of big data using RDBMS technology is a costly, time-consuming and often futile endeavor. And most NoSQL solutions are plagued by operational complexity and arcane configurations.
Cost.
Meeting even one of the challenges presented here with RDBMS or even most NoSQL solutions can cost a pretty penny. Doing big data the right way doesn’t have to break the bank.
There's a better way to do big data
Experience the one big data platform that meets all of your big data challenges
We believe you should be able to do anything you want with big data. Without headaches, hidden time sinks, high drama or high costs. That's why we created DataStax Enterprise. It's the only big data platform that answers all of your big data challenges. It combines the massive scalability, high performance, continuous availability and tunable consistency of real-time Apache Cassandra with analytics powered by Apache Hadoop and enterprise search with Apache Solr, creating a smartly integrated secure platform for the most demanding big data enterprise workloads.
How are enterprises around the world using DataStax Enterprise to power applications that transform business? Find Out Now
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