From Grid computing to cloud computing to big data---it's a theory of evolution.

He was the winner of IBM's top honors IBM Fellow for IT technology innovators, and he led the IBM Grid Computing strategy, the founder and chairman of the EMC Corporate Fellows and Outstanding Engineers Evaluation Committee, and he plays an important role in EMC's technology orientation. For years, he has been at the forefront of it technology change, the EMC Senior Vice president and CTO Jeff Nick. Recently, Mr. Jeff Nick received an exclusive interview with Watchstor and talked about the views of the most popular technologies, such as cloud computing and large data.

From Grid computing to cloud computing to big data---it's a theory of evolution.

Looking back over the past more than 10 years of IT development, grid computing, cloud computing, and large data are three major topics that cannot be spared. Grid computing has been vigorous, but the end is nothing; cloud computing is also surging, gradually towards the landing when there is still no doubt the sound; Big data is now in the limelight, the controversy is also the most intense. Every change in IT technology has its own causes and consequences, regardless of grid computing, cloud computing, large data, and even the future of a new IT concept, all need to understand their essence.

EMC CTO Jeff Nick thinks that computing from the grid to cloud computing to big data is like an evolution of it, he says: "Grid computing is actually the predecessor of Cloud Computing, formerly known as utility-type computing, which focuses on how to achieve resource sharing and unified distribution over the Internet." Grid computing and cloud computing are actually connected. In terms of technology, cloud computing and grid computing have many commonalities, such as deploying an application on a grid computing structure and running a Hadoop job on a parallel-processing multi-node with many of the same characteristics. ”

Figure I: EMC Company Senior vice president and chief Technology Officer Jeff-nick accepted Watchstor exclusive interview.

In fact, in the history of IT development, if a technology can not be well commercialized and market-oriented, then this technology can not be able to achieve great market recognition and success. EMC CTO Jeff Nick that cloud computing is the result of the commercialization of grid computing, saying: "Grid computing is actually a call from research circles such as universities and research institutes to meet the needs of research circles, and cloud computing is just a commercial or commercialized it." The highly commercialized application of life sciences, weather forecasting applications, or oil and gas exploration applications, as well as the HPC functional boundaries of past grid computing, has been blurred, which is the embodiment of the commercialization of cloud computing. ”

Jeff Nick also thinks Big data will be the next step in the overall evolution of cloud computing, saying: "Let's take a closer look at the cloud computing process and find out why there's big data." The first phase of cloud computing is the promotion of resource sharing, this is also a feature of grid computing; the second step is to put the application in the cloud, which is what we usually call SaaS services (software as services); The third step is to build the PAAs platform; the fourth step is to unify the data analysis, which is the big data we are talking about. ”

Data is at the heart of the future

The fund company uses Hadoop to analyze social network user sentiment to forecast the stock market trend, the big retail supermarket analyzes the user purchase behavior through the analysis commodity position data, the shopping website analyzes the advertisement placement through the user clicks the data, the oil and gas company searches the oil and gas resources through the analysis various exploration data. Many vivid cases seem to tell people that an era of data analysis has come, and a revolution in data value is underway.

EMC Senior Vice president and CTO Jeff Nick said: "I think the economy is now not only in the globalization, the economy is still in the information." This information-based economy refers to the desire to gain more insight and gain more favorable value. These values are not only business value, but also social benefit value, and all of these depend on our information and data manufacturing, processing and rapid response to it. ”

The big data age has come, the value of large data is really as good as the manufacturers describe it? In fact, the emergence of a large data concept has produced more debate than any it concept in the cloud, and the questioning of big data has never ceased, a question that is all about, including laws and regulations, business value, Commercial innovation, technical means, etc. For example, in terms of laws and regulations, for the enterprise itself, in order to obtain the most accurate business insight, the desired data sample should be the larger the better, this will undoubtedly exceed the enterprise's own business data category, the enterprise itself naturally want to obtain more external data, How to define the legality of these external data sources is still in the legal blank; For example, in terms of data availability, enterprises have added valuable data every day, there will be some data loss of its value, if to judge the effectiveness of data, how to explore the value of effective data is still a need for enterprises to face a major problem.

In this respect, Jeff Nick said: "There is an old saying is ' embarrassment '." If there is a problem, but the interests of the attraction is very large, human society will find a way to overcome. We cannot ignore what is happening: We are climbing the entire data value chain, in the past we are only doing some relational database, and now we are going up, through Hadoop to do data analysis, to do the horizontal expansion of information, to achieve data sharing in the cloud, These can actually help us to generate greater value from the entire information ecological chain. "Jeff Nick's point of view makes people think of the development of net silver, net silver from the beginning to now has been faced with security problems, but the net silver did not disappear, but was greatly popularized, and brought great convenience to human life."

In addition, Jeff Nick also stressed the importance of data from quantitative to qualitative change, he stressed: "The data is more and more like the gravity of the Earth, the amount of data to a certain extent will trigger quantitative change to qualitative change, like the gravity of the Earth, its importance will be significantly increased." ”

To that end, Jeff Nick the three big data interesting phenomenon: "The first example is the private data cloud, we found that more and more enterprises in the data generation, data distribution is not in the traditional data center, many enterprises began to build proprietary data private cloud, which itself contains a number of data centers, Data analysis is not concentrated in a data center, and it is more efficient to put data analysis capabilities on the site where the data is located, which is why private data clouds are emerging rapidly; The second example is the symbiotic data cloud, a federated data cloud or synthetic data cloud, For example, if Twitter is interested in a topic and needs to extract information about the topic, which requires strong real-time data analysis, Twitter can transfer packets generated per hour from the topic to another company that specializes in data, The company's analysis of the data and its exchange of results to Twitter is called a symbiotic data cloud; another example is that large data analysis is beneficial to the creation of social welfare, such as in the medical field, through data analysis for genetic research, and the optimization of individual medical programs, This is the social service type data cloud. ”

Trend, irreversible. Although large data still have great doubts about business decision making and business innovation, but the economy is moving towards informatization today, the data is the core of the past traditional business model. Not to discuss the big data to the commercial innovation how much help, the big data to the human society welfare, the social benefit, the business model optimization does have the widespread application foreground.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)