Slowly but surely, health care is becoming a killer app for big data. Whether it’s Hadoop, machine learning or natural-language processing, folks in the worlds of medicine and hospital administration understand that data is the key to helping them take their fields to the next level.
Hadoop is on its way to becomig the de facto platform for the next-generation of data-based applications, but it’s not without some flaws. Ironically, one of Hadoop’s biggest shortcomings right now is also one of its biggest strengths going forward — the Hadoop Distributed File System.
Bina Technologies emerged from stealth mode last week and is bringing an Apple-like business model to genomics. The company relies on its Bina Box to make genome analysis faster than ever before possible without the benefit of having a supercomputer and a research network on hand.
By pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into big data research and development, the Obama administration thinks it can push the current state of the art well beyond what’s possible today, and into entirely new research areas. It’s a noble goal, but also a necessary one.
The face of high-performance computing is changing. That means new technologies and new names, but also familiar names in new places. Anyone that doesn’t have a cloud computing story to tell, possibly a big data one too, might starting looking really old really quickly.
Appistry, a St. Louis–based software company, has closed a $12 million Series D round for its family of distributed computing products. The company also appears to have changed its corporate messaging — from that of a cloud-computing vendor to that of a big-data vendor.
Michael Dell is talking this week talking about having acquisition plans in “software, data centers, cloud computing, storage and virtualization,” which raises questions about who it might be eying up. There are five vendors, in particular, that could give high value for a relatively low price.
Cloud application-platform provider Appistry has teamed with Accenture to develop Cloud MapReduce product. Cloud MapReduce is focused on real-time analysis of streaming data, and it complements Appistry’s distributed file system to form a Hadoop alternative for certain applications.
A few months ago, I posited that additional funding for Cloudera and Karmasphere signifies a large market opportunity for solutions that utilize the open-source analytics tool Hadoop. From the news generated this week by Yahoo’s third annual Hadoop Summit, my beliefs of this have only been affirmed.
Appistry today added another element to its cloud-computing application platform, announcing the April availability of CloudIQ Storage. With it, St. Louis-based Appistry joins the growing ranks of companies seizing on demand cloud storage solutions that maintain performance in the face of rapidly growing data volumes.
