Converging Enterprise Storage and Business Intelligence: A Reference Architecture for Data-Centric Infrastructure

Many corporate environments are faced with supporting both new business intelligence (BI) services such as Apache Hadoop* and Spark* in addition to more traditional facilities for compute and storage. Enterprise IT Organizations, Cloud Hosting Providers, and Cloud Service Providers have all explored the deployment of BI solutions in various forms, and have raised a common set of concerns. When BI solutions are implemented in isolation, experience shows that they are expensive to deploy, add environmental complexity, and integrate poorly with existing and mature facilities for data durability and failure recovery. Business intelligence stacks have matured and offer rich new capabilities for enterprises that deploy them, but they also present a burden to IT organizations as a new and additional “silo” to manage.