Big Data TCO Lessons From Virtualization Technology Sprawl

The complexity of big data makes it a difficult concept for many to grasp, and utilizing it effectively is one of the biggest challenges businesses face today. There is little doubt that big data offers organizations a number of clear advantages, but applying them across the entire enterprise is one obstacle that can truly be described as formidable, even daunting, to even the most technologically savvy companies. One department might be able to create its own business solutions through big data analytics, while another department might come up with answers of their own, but lack of true coordination and collaboration remains a significant problem. Businesses aren’t without help in this area, however, because they’ve encountered similar problems before. Many companies have encountered issues such as virtualization technology sprawl, and the lessons learned from addressing that problem could prove to be exceptionally valuable when dealing with big data true cost of ownership (TCO).

To understand the problem and the solution, we must first look back at the rapid growth of virtualization technology, more specifically server virtualization. As businesses adopted virtualization, the mainframe systems soon diverged into multiple systems. The more popular virtualization became, the more projects were taken on and the more technologies diverged. Larger companies eventually sought technology specialists to work within their areas of expertise. The result of the use of these individual teams was virtualization technology sprawl, an inefficient development that eventually lead to even higher operational costs. For all the benefits virtualization technology offered, many of them were outweighed by the increased demands and greater management complexity that came from technology sprawl.

Businesses were quick to come up with new solutions for the problem. The most common was to adopt a converged infrastructure . This strategy directly addressed the higher operational costs that resulted from technology sprawl, basically breaking through the silos by taking multiple technologies and combining them into single stacks for computing, storage, and networking. This made the management of virtualization technology much easier since operational complexity was significantly reduced. In other words, management of this technology was kept at a reasonable size.

The same principle can apply to big data management across an entire organization. When it comes to management of big data and hadoop security, it’s easy to get caught up in the immensity of it all. The fact that big data is so versatile and can be applied to so many different use cases also means it can apply to any number of different divisions within a company. This creates silos and a general desire to hold onto data sets. In other words, big data ends up in a sprawl of its own, becoming that much more unwieldy and complicated, which is a major problem for a technology that’s already so complex to begin with.

The lesson that every company should take away from the solution to virtualization technology sprawl is the breaking down of barriers to big data management. It all comes down to ready access to all the necessary data no matter what roles an employee may have within a company. Businesses shouldn’t have to worry over the cost it takes to store and process data since the insights gained from big data analytics are particularly valuable. Most importantly, it’s about avoiding big data from getting too big, to the point where it becomes unmanageable and merely adds to the overall operating costs of a company. It’s true that big data introduces more complexity, but businesses that have learned how to store and process it efficiently, sometimes through big data platforms or cloud-based services, are in a more advantageous position than companies still dealing with technology sprawl. The lessons learned from previous problems can indeed play a helpful role in solving the problems many experience today.