Versant and Big Data Apps
The data management challenges associated with Big Data have confronted the modern business in an abrupt manner.
So what is Big Data?
At Versant, we identify Big Data according to reports from leading research firms Giga OM and Gartner Group:
"… when the data volume and performance requirements become significant design and decision factors for implementing a data management and analysis system"
- Giga OM
"… [when] volume, complexity, speed, changing analysis model, are increasingly becoming important design factors in enterprise architectures"
- Gartner
Evolution of Big Data Technologies
Traditional database technologies have reached an inflection point. Escalating costs to manage volume, complexity and required performance have only marginal return. A rapidly growing user base (known as the “Consumerism of IT”), coupled with an exponential growth in data volume, complexity and real-time analytical “in-database” requirements are responsible for this.
Well-publicized first generation Big Data technologies emerged, mostly from companies needing a quick bandaid to provide data management solutions at Web scale, for example Facebook/Cassandra or Four Square/Mongo DB. However, those solutions are not core to the business of the inventor. Several open source projects have taken on these technologies; however, we believe that these technologies are relatively immature, special purpose products. They lack, for example, enterprise infrastructure and industry standards; thus, they cannot handle the inherent data complexity found in enterprise businesses.
For more than 20 years Versant database technology is serving some of the most mission critical applications including large scale data management projects at companies such as Verizon and the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Both are considered today as Big Data applications.
Volume, Complexity, Speed, Concurrency
Consider the needs beyond the simplistic early “NoSQL” key-value technologies. The truth is there is a need for technology that can handle both scale, performance and the increasing complexity and concurrency in business solutions.
The Versant Database Engine facilitates large data ingestion and distribution in a partitioned data set capable of scaling out over time, yet will allow efficient coupling to the “soft real-time” analytical systems driving your business success. Versant delivers today a comprehensive NoSQL technology stack leveraging the architectural advantages of a key-value solution, with the ability to handle structured, semi-structured, unstructured and transactional aspects of your Big Data requirements.
Big Data for Complex Event Processing
Versant’s unique approach allows the seamless coupling of raw unstructured data, mined for interesting aggregations - such as via integration with MapReduce / Hadoop and other technologies - back into a full blown distributed, scale-out, enterprise database management system without the need to constantly move data between systems.
We are working on exciting new technologies and integrations and continue to lead the innovation for large scale high performance Big Data database applications.