1859: Egyptian workers under French engineers begin construction of the Suez Canal. A canal across the Isthmus of Suez would cut the ocean distance from Europe to Asia by up to 6,000 miles, and it could be built at sea level, without any locks. Circumventing the additional travel would reduce risk, overhead of additional supplies, and fewer sailors. Completed ten years later, the effect on the world trade was immediate. This wonder shrunk the globe rapidly at a topography level but also in the time, it traditionally took to gain business and economic benefits.
The economic benefits of the Suez Canal and In-Place Hadoop analytics
My metaphor here is that like sailing the old, 12,000+ mile route around the coast of Africa, the traditional method of storing and moving data for analysis is a long and arduous journey that affects your business and economic benefits. Just as the pre-Suez Canal journey from Europe to Asia required significantly more time, larger ships, more crew and more provisions, the traditional route to analytics requires more time (copying and moving data) bigger ships (3x storage capacity), more crew (IT resources) and more provisions (overhead). Now, imagine taking the EMC data lake route that reduces overhead, takes much less time, and offers increased flexibility. The EMC Isilon data lake with its native Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) support is the modern route to actionable results. It effectively brings Hadoop to where your data exists today, as opposed to having to ship and replicate your data to a separate Hadoop stack for analysis.
The Open Data Platform Initiative (ODPi), IBM and EMC Isilon
The Isilon data lake’s shared storage architecture natively supports HDFS, and the ODPi common platform. IBM, EMC, Pivotal and Hortonworks established the ODPi to create a standardized, common platform for Hadoop analytics that enables organizations to realize business results more quickly. Which brings us to the EMC and IBM analytics collaboration. IBM BigInsights, being a part of the ODPi, means now there’s another choice for in-place analytics with the EMC data lake. And, it quickly became evident to both EMC and IBM that there was a strong customer demand for IBM BigInsights and EMC Isilon to align on a data lake approach to analytics. The EMC and IBM collaboration enables analytics on your data right where it is, within the EMC Isilon data lake, while IBM BigInsights provides the separate compute resources that analyze the data. Now you’re on the expedited route to business analytics with EMC Isilon and IBM.
Whether you are looking to gain a 360-degree view of your customers, attempting to prevent fraud in the financial markets, or making smarter infrastructure investments, the increased efficiencies of the partnership allows you to be nimble in understanding and reacting to what your data is telling you.
About 15,000 ships make the 11-hour journey through the canal each year. It’s estimated that the canal bears roughly 8 percent of the world’s shipping and is recognized as one of the most important waterways in the world. Forrester Research1 predicts big data analytics as the number 2 priority of corporations, and states Hadoop has already disrupted the economics of data. Just as the Suez Canal offers key business benefits for trade between Europe and Asia, so does in-place analytics. Here’s how: 
- No moving and copying of data
- No 3X replication of data
- Increased storage utilization efficiency (to an average of 80%)
- Enterprise data resiliency and availability
- Enterprise grade security features
- Quicker time to business insight
- Smarter infrastructure investments
- Reduction of CAPEX and OPEX
- Increased choice and flexibility
In summary, back to the metaphor, the modern route to analytics saves on time to benefit, and can be achieved with smaller ships, less crew, and with fewer provisions required.
Where can I get more details?
The EMC Hadoop Starter Kit for IBM BigInsights is available and has instructions on how to build and deploy IBM BigInsights Open Platform with EMC Isilon. You can also learn more about the Hadoop enabled EMC Data Lake here.
1 Source: Forrester Predictions 2015: Hadoop Will Become a Cornerstone of Your Business Technology Agenda
