Sponsored Content18 FEBRUARY/MARCH 2014 | DBTA

the dAtA wArehoUsing mission is at a crossroads. For the first time in history, multiple methods of storing and processing data are secure, robust, readily available—and most importantly—ubiquitous. Today’s leading companies are beginning to deploy multiple data warehouse methods side-by-side, not reluctantly abandoning their single ‘standard,’ but changing by choice.

In the past, it was heretical in large corporations to voluntarily expand the number of methods available for processing and storing data for analytics. IT departments fought a constant battle to maintain a single standard data warehouse ‘stack’ rather than allow a proliferation of approaches used by best-of-breed analytic applications sponsored by business units. These opposing views often contributed to the lack of goodwill between business and IT. The idea that IT would ever go down a road that involved the acceptance of multiple data management approaches at a time was implausible.

The majority of IT teams now embrace a logical data warehouse that includes one or two business-specific or data-specific data warehouses, surrounded by a number of very large data ‘marts,’ as well as application-specific analytic warehouses. The fight for a single monolithic structure has taken a dramatic U-turn. No one can argue against Big Data or data proliferation if the data helps the business—it will get cleaned, secured, analyzed and distributed eventually. What is different today is that no one is arguing to have new data sit in one place and be managed the same way.

Large organizations are now embracing other options. Just as it became clear that fighting against the use of multiple data structures was impeding progress, it is apparent that opposing multiple approaches to data warehousing is futile. Organizations already have and will add multiple platforms to store and process data. Every large organization will—within five years—have a data warehouse appliance, Hadoop, and a traditional data warehouse server with database software accessing it, all at once.

No one usually pauses to think for a minute about all of the data moving freely around an organization. Data must move to where it is needed most, whether it travels via an enterprise data bus, or extraction, transformation and load, or by email in Excel spreadsheets. In the future, no one will think about bringing in the right storage, processing, and software to create optimized architectures. Because, for the first time, these architectures will be easy to adopt, train for and secure. They also will not have barriers that impede them from working together. Everyone will have one standard: a portfolio full of (as IBM’s Tom Deutsch describes them) “fit-for-purpose-architectures.”

While Hadoop becomes common, the evolution won’t stop there. Further down the road, Hadoop will be viewed as just the beginning. Hadoop will be the technology that broke down the wall and made everything ‘flat.’ Hadoop will make it acceptable to create a ‘spectrum’ of hardware in a portfolio that is ‘matched’ to the data best fit for it; a spectrum of compute ‘matched’ to processing needs;

a spectrum of management software that adopts applications or even jobs and tasks. Eventually, this spread spectrum will consolidate under a few vendors with the ability to see across data, analytics, users, workloads, storage, transformations, and insight.

As a data fabric emerges with multiple patterns, certain software and hardware will become more important. Data Federation will have to advance, with applications like Cisco’s Composite having to carry the load of making sure data stores and approaches can be ‘virtualized’ to applications. More often, the traditional roadblock of an ‘application’ will mean less, with the heaviest transformations or workloads in a single application moving to the cheapest compute, and lighter code working on a fitter server. The breaking down of barriers traditionally required by an ‘application’ is really the next destination, and the future of data warehousing.

What can we be sure of? In the near term, every company will adopt the cost savings of Hadoop. This adoption will accelerate and blaze across corporate IT. Follow on pressure will be created by newer technologies—provided by Hadoop distribution vendors and Hadoop ecosystem vendors, as well as by traditional vendors-turned-innovators, such as Cisco and Syncsort. A tremendous need will emerge to truly see what data and usage is actually valuable. This visibility will become the driving force behind a data warehousing future that looks very little like yesterday’s model. n

APPFLUENT www.appfluent.com

The Data Warehouse U-TurnBy Shawn Dolley, Vice President,

Corporate Development & Strategy, Appfluent