Sunday, April 7, 2013

IBM's BLU Acceleration Speeds Up Big Data

IBM introduced new software aimed at accelerating the analysis of Big Data.  The company also announced a new IBM PureData System for Hadoop in the enterprise.


IBM's new BLU Acceleration software provides faster access to key information by extending the capabilities of traditional in-memory systems -- which allows data to be loaded into Random Access Memory instead of hard disks for faster performance.  IBM said that during its testing, the software was able to deliver some queries in a typical analytics workload at more than 1000 times faster.  New techniques include "data skipping," which allows the ability to skip over data that doesn't need to be analyzed, such as duplicate information; the ability to analyze data in parallel across different processors; and greater ability to analyze data transparently to the application, without the need to develop a separate layer of data modeling. BLU Acceleration also employs a technique called "actionable compression," where data no longer has to be decompressed to be analyzed.  

The PureData System for Hadoop will start shipping to customers in the second half 2013.

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/40768.wss