Chapter 6 – Introduction to High-Performance Appliances for Big Data Management

In this chapter we look at specialty-hardware designed for analytics and how they are engineered to accommodate large data sets. We discuss the different aspects of the big data technology ecosystem: scalable storage, high performance computing platform, data management, the application development and execution framework, scalable analytics, and configuration and management. Motivating the discussion with some big data use cases, we look at the storage, appliance, and data management needs, and then review the different characteristics of each aspect of the ecosystem. We explore different models for big data appliances (both hardware and software style), and review how performance expectations can influence the decision for acquisition.