Big Data: The Mainstream of Cloud Computing in the Future

In order to further strengthen the front line of cloud products, NaviSite, a cloud computing and hosting company of Time Warner Cable Company, released a new product plan some time ago to provide storage services to users. As analysts say, this plan marks a key step for cloud service providers toward the big data analytics market.

At Interop 2012, NaviSite announced an intelligent storage product called NaviCloud Intelligent Storage. The product is based on the EMC Atmos cloud architecture, which allows enterprise customers to store, back up, and share files with it. NaviSite, formerly a traditional hosted application service, has been moving toward the development of collaboration tools and virtual desktops in recent years. According to Chris Patterson, director of cloud products at NaviSite, object storage will soon become the focus of business users.

"It's not disruptive change, it's just expanding our business," Patterson said. "In the past we have introduced a lot of good cloud products, but to make enterprises stand out in the market competition, we also need to find more powerful and more able to meet the needs of customers supporting services." The company has developed a preliminary service billing Mechanism - $ 0.2 per GB and the package will be available in June of this year.

According to Richard Villars, an analyst at IDC Research, NaviSite is looking to consolidate existing cloud offerings and bring customers a more complete global software portfolio. He also pointed out that the next step for infrastructure vendors in the future will be to utilize cloud resources to store data and at the same time to continuously improve the processing power of the analytics tools and eventually fulfill the fundamental purpose that information serves the business. "We expect big data analytics to be absolutely essential if we are to gain a firm foothold in the high-end cloud services market over the next few years," he said. To achieve this plan, we must first create a complete object storage services. "Obviously, any vendor planning to do cloud data analysis must have a set of object storage businesses first, and to provide customers with the data storage space we can truly get such vital business information and analyze development strategies in a targeted manner. "

NaviSite has yet to announce specific plans for its move into big data analytics, but Patterson said the company is poised to scale up existing services in the coming months.

Villars believes that the big data analytics cloud in the cloud will gradually accumulate top popularity among the corporate end user population. Most of the big data analysis-related work requires companies to prepare huge amounts of computing resources in a short period of time, this explosive demand growth is clearly not every company can afford. "It turns out that it is simply not realistic to have a consistent analysis of the information, and we can only focus on superior resources and try to squeeze the analysis down in a short period of time. Four days and four hours now, we need to win this tough fight , It is clear that businesses should harness the power of cloud services, "explained Villars.

As more and more businesses keep their business data in the public cloud, their interest in buying data analytics services is also getting stronger, he said. At the same time, service providers can take advantage of the various analytic tools represented by Hadoop to cater to the needs of their customers and use this as a turning point to create a new service direction.

Industry giants have already started the move. Just this month, Google Inc. just released BigQuery, a cloud-based big data analytics tool. Amazon Web Services has also completed the development of a cloud-based Hadoop product, Elastic Map Reduce. "We do not intend to alarmist, in fact, if you are not interested, you can completely ignore this technology trend, but the fact is undeniable that the entire cloud services market has begun to move closer to the big data analysis," Villars concluded.