Coho Data, a provider of scale-out flash storage for the enterprise, recently announced that they are delivering a converged platform based on Intel technology to bring big data analytics directly to primary storage.
Developed in partnership with UBS AG, a Fortune 100 financial services company, this architecture unifies the traditionally separate enterprise storage and business intelligence (BI) environments, creating a dynamic, technology-agnostic foundation for big data operations and real-time analytics.
UBS AG strengthens its competitive stance by leveraging business intelligence derived from increasingly sophisticated analytics.
The company’s IT group sought to maintain the functional benefits of a mature enterprise storage system, while incorporating BI tools into the system to perform analytics tasks efficiently on the enterprise data in situ.
Through convergence of the traditionally separate enterprise storage and BI environments, the new architecture established a stronger, more resilient foundation for enterprise-scale, big data operations and real-time analytics.
“Big data has massive potential, but today’s reality is that there are technical and operational barriers that introduce cost and complexity long before an organisation even begins to work with their data,” said Andrew Warfield, Coho Data co-founder and CTO.
“Our container converged solution means that enterprises spend less time distracted with big data infrastructure, and enables them to focus the on real goal of extracting value from their data.”
Until now, the hardware profiles of enterprise storage systems and big data servers have been very different: storage controllers were too compute constrained to bring compute closer to data while big data implementations offered neither the features nor performance to provide general purpose storage.
By combining Intel Xeon processors, NVMe-based Intel Solid State Drives, and 40Gb software defined switching, this architecture presents a storage environment with ample compute to address big data processing in situ.
The container-integrated solution provides UBS with the ability for multiple tenants to quickly provision and deploy isolated big data environments directly within Coho’s enterprise storage system. New big data clusters may be instantiated in a matter of minutes and are able to process data in a protocol and distribution-agnostic manner. Removing the friction associated with hardware procurement, data access, and software configuration means an enormous improvement in time to value.
Coho’s architecture presents customers with the potential to realise a 75% reduction in the total cost of ownership for big data infrastructure.
These savings are a result of improved density: there is no need to purchase separate physical infrastructure for big data servers or to cover the operational costs of power and cooling for an additional silo of datacentre hardware.
In addition, storage integration removes obstacles associated with data movement, while containers simplify the configuration and deployment.