Analytics and In-Memory Databases Are Changing Data Centers

“Traditional databases, with index files and table spaces on
disk and paging tables into memory, are becoming a thing of the
past. Between search engines, which use large clusters of hardware
and keep everything in memory, and memory-based databases, which
basically use storage as just backup for memory, traditional
databases and storage are becoming less important. Today search
engines and some databases scale out not by adding storage, but by
adding 1U servers.

“With big vendors like Microsoft and SAP buying into in-memory
analytics to solve Big Data challenges, the big question for IT is
what this trend will mean for the traditional data center
infrastructure. Will storage, even flash drives, be needed in the
future, given the requirement for real-time data analysis and
current trends in design for real-time data analytics? Or will
storage move from the heart of data centers and become merely a
means of backup and recovery for critical real-time apps? Remember,
we are not discussing large data warehouses and databases that do
not have a need for speed, but the real-time data analytics market,
which has become something of an obsession in the last couple of
years as companies try to do more with less and look to their vast
troves of data for competitive advantage.”

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