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Dell Releases Big Data Retention Product With Searchable Data Compression

The Dell Big Data Retention solution utilizes RainStor data compression techniques.

As financial services organizations face stricter regulations that require more information and deeper analytics, they are challenged by the deluge of big data. To help financial firms deal with the volume of data, Dell has launched a Big Data Retention solution that can reduce the costs of retaining big data while helping to improve management for retrieval and analysis.

"The regulators want to you keep all data," says Bob Barris, VP of sales for Dell's Global 500 banking and securities business and global practice lead for the banking and securities vertical, in an interview. "You can't afford to put all of the data on legacy storage devices because it is too expensive. These new services capabilities will help customers."

The new Dell Big Data Retention solution is designed for organizations that leverage big data analytics to derive business value from their data, according to Dell. The product integrates with existing analytics platforms as a frontend big data repository for large datasets or a backend archive. It can also serve as a standalone repository or as an analytics platform with Hadoop.

[For more on Big Data in financial services, read: Big Data Technology: Buyer Beware.]

One of the more innovative features of the product is the ability to search compressed data without having to decompress it, according to Barris. "The product has a compression capability around big data," he says. "The RainStor technology compresses data 40 to 1, or a 97 percent compression rate. But most importantly, the data can be searched without decompression."

The Big Data Retention solution combines Dell storage, including the DX Object Storage platform, and RainStor database technology, to help reduce the cost of retaining big data through data reduction, data management and scalability, which can provide easy access to the data by standard SQL BI/analytics tools. The solution also includes Dell professional services to help customers enhance their current big data environment or create a new one that can scale to company demands and data growth, according to Dell.

In financial services, much of the interest around Big Data comes from compliance and regulatory efforts. "Most of the focus on big data is compliance and risk management," he says. "A lot of it is regulatory driven. The environment around risk and trying to understand it and liquidity is important. That is driving big data and analytics. If you have a good handle on it, you can demonstrate that you can understand your risk profile quickly."

Much of the anticipated massive data growth is tied to automated systems that continuously create structured or semi-structured data that can be mined by data analytic programs to drive new discoveries and save money. The further adoption of big data analytics will ultimately place enormous demands on IT to change the way data is stored and managed.

The RainStor database provides online data retention at a massive scale, with unlimited scalability and zero administration. It can be deployed on any combination of Dell servers and storage, on premise or in a cloud configuration. When paired with the Dell DX Object Storage platform, the solution provides a single system for retaining structured, semi-structured and unstructured data across an unlimited number of data sources, formats and types, providing cost savings that can change the economics of big data retention.

The Dell Big Data Retention solution can provide an average data compression ratio of up to 40:1, freeing up disk space approximately 97 percent. This greatly-reduced footprint can accelerate query access for analytics. The solution leverages the capabilities of the Dell Fluid Data architecture, which enables these extreme data volumes to be efficiently accessed, moved and leveraged when and where needed.

While available on other Dell storage platforms, when the Big Data Retention solution is added to the DX Object Storage Platform customers can add capacity in amounts as small as 1TB, scaling up to petabytes and to billions of objects without the set-up and management complexity and costs of traditional file and block storage. The Dell Big Data Retention solution is currently available in the U.S.

With this latest offering, Dell expands its portfolio of Big Data capabilities across the spectrum of ingest, storage, management, warehousing, and analytics. Customers can scale from efficient storage and retention, into more complex analytics like the Dell Cloudera management platform, Apache Hadoop Solutions based on Dell PowerEdge C- and R- series servers, Force 10 networks, and Dell Crowbar deployment toolkit.

"Not only are the volumes of data growing -- so is its value to the organization," said Darren Thomas, vice president and general manager, Dell Enterprise Storage in a press release. "Being able to cost-effectively capture and store all of the relevant data makes it possible to gain insights that support innovation and business value. The key is having the right data management solution to fluidly move data, tier it, dedupe it, protect it and archive it. To us, that means your data is fluid." Greg MacSweeney is editorial director of InformationWeek Financial Services, whose brands include Wall Street & Technology, Bank Systems & Technology, Advanced Trading, and Insurance & Technology. View Full Bio

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