Hypecycle: Turning data into dollars

PIcture a stack of printed paper sitting on your desk and stretching half way to the moon. That's equal to about a quarter of an exabyte or 252,000 terabytes or how much data was transmitted on mobile networks last month.

In just the last four months of last year, more data was sent over mobile networks than was sent over the internet in 2003. And that growth is predicted to skyrocket to 75 exabytes a year in five years, according to research from Cisco published last month. And as more devices connect
to the net and speeds pick up on networks across the world, the need to transmit, store and make sense of such vast troves of data is becoming a business necessity.

Akamai’s State of the Internet report released a few weeks ago found that in the third quarter of last year there was a 6.6 percent increase in IP addresses connecting to its network and although South Korea and San Jose continue to lead in terms of average and peak speeds, more than half of IP addresses in Australia reported 2Mbps while Riverwood in NSW reported an average speed of 5.8Mbps making it one of the fastest places on Earth.

The obvious beneficiaries of a data-centred civilisation are of course storage and networks but probe a little deeper and you will see that your customers are facing a range of upgrades over the coming year to make best use of the tidal wave of data coming their way.

Networks

The most obvious beneficiaries are network equipment makers and resellers who have the added clout to tell their customers that IPv4 addresses we relied on to connect to the net just ran out. APNIC, the organisation that hands out such addresses, says about three-quarters of those allocated to Australia were dished out.

The next internet protocol standard, IPv6, is yet to catch on but you can be sure that smart customers and resellers are already auditing networks to future-proof them. For instance, IPv6 Day on June 6 was organised by companies with a stake in the internet to raise awareness of the new standard.

And if you’re going to all that trouble, consider rewiring with cat6 Ethernet or adding wireless 802.11n ports. Smart sparkies are already reporting that many homes and offices are prepping for the National Broadband Network with such upgrades. Consider WAN optimisation if you find network use is saturated.

Companies: Cisco, Aruba, Netgear, NBN Co, Riverbed, Silverpeak

Storage

All those electrons have to reside somewhere and it’s leading to a blossoming of storage. A study published last month in the journal Science found that between 1986 and 2007, storage volumes grew by half every year. It found there were 295 exabytes of storage in 2007, so by extrapolation there will be nearly 1500 exabytes in storage by the end of this year and nearly 8 zettabytes in five years.

Much of that storage is in the form of network attached storage, in which many SMEs are investing. Most such devices have cloud services integrated into them or it’s possible to use third parties such as DropBox or Lockbox (for secure online storage).

When advising on a storage solution consider those that have de- duplication features so an emailed document, for instance, is stored as a single instance and isn’t replicated every time a worker forwards it to someone.

Solutions ready for virtualisation are to be favoured because there is a push in most firms to simplify their infrastructure.

And it might be time to ask your customers about their backup and disaster recovery plans – is it time to retire those old tapes to put that data on platters or in the cloud?

Companies: EMC, NetAPP, Netgear, DropBox

Cloud

High-speed, low-latency networks and cloud services are a chicken and egg proposition – with the former, the latter becomes useful but how do you estimate the benefit until your network or
your customer’s network is at perfect pitch?

Services run in the cloud relieve businesses from wrangling their data and are a source of further sprawl. Keep an eye on where data is stored and the contracts that dictate its preservation and maintenance. Keep data used daily close to the customer and push the rest into the cloud.

Look to see what applications can be run from the cloud or hosted. More businesses are looking seriously at providers such as Google and Salesforce.com for their everyday apps and with Microsoft anointing the sector it seems business is about to explode.

But there are other providers of cloud servics, most notably in information security, that are worth considering. And you can always white labelling under your brand.

Companies: Microsoft, salesforce.com, Google, Mozy, Rackspace (for hosting).

Mobile devices and networks

President Obama committed the US to 98 percent coverage of 4G wireless networks in about five years, which may outpace predictions for mobile data traffic.

Mobile digital information devices from smartphones to e-book readers and tablets and will now come with wireless connectivity whether wi-fi or cellular networks to capture, create and curate information. 

Video

Much of the data being generated is video data and of high quality. When even basic smartphones have high-definition cameras in them it’s easy to see that this content, no matter how well compressed, takes a lot of bandwidth.

The company building Australia’s NBN has often pointed to video as a driver of network capacity and Cisco has declared all end points in its vision of the future should have video.

From the free Skype to high-end telepresence of Cisco, Tandberg and LifeSize, video communications will come to represent up to three- quarters of all data transmitted across wired and mobile networks in five years, Cisco says.

Companies: Cisco, Polycom, LifeSize, Skype, Tandberg

Printing and document management

History shows that as data blooms, it is fed by printing. Although users can access data on their mobile devices there's a corresponding need for the cheap efficiency of paper.

Managed print services will continue to be important and while people will find ways to consume information without resorting to the printed page, ink on paper will continue to be an important way for people to make sense of the world.

The smart systems will help organisations store and manage their information, offload printing to smart devices and aid retrieval.

Companies: Fuji Xerox, Documentum, FileNet

Information security

Companies doing more business online and relying on it for their daily operations need to take greater care with their information security requirements.

Akamai data has previously found a correlation between the number of IP addresses and growth in network attacks such as distributed denial of service. The US is still the No.1 source for attack traffic, originating 12 percent (up about 10 percent in three months).

The Akamai report found port 445 – SMB or Samba over IP – was the most attacked port, accounting for more than half of attacks because of its extreme utility to malicious hackers who silently upload and run programs on unwitting users’ machines without them knowing. Companies: Resellers without deep and broad skills should partner with a consultancy.

Search

Generating and storing data is fairly useless unless there is a way to retrieve it. This the secret that Sergey Brin and Larry Page stumbled on more than 10 years ago while at university and it grew into the immensely successful Google, which has reshaped much of society and business.

But search is also important in organisations and it was for this reason that the Google Appliance was born. It helps organisations connect workers with documents stored with metadata, to each other and Web 2.0 and social search such as Twitter and Google Apps as well as Microsoft Sharepoint. The latest version searches and indexes up to 30 million documents.

Companies: Google.

Analytics and business intelligence

Dan Bricklin, inventor of the spreadsheet, could not have foreseen what putting data analytics in the hands of users would have created.

Visualisation of numbers is a growing need especially where massive data sets are called for. Services such as Tableau and Wolfram Alpha help massage numbers into a form understandable by all.

Companies: Cognos, Tableau, Vertica (HP), SAS, IBM

Processors

Intel’s Sandy Bridge multiple-core processor was intended to provide high-performance graphics on an integrated chipset, ideal for visualising and manipulating big data sets.

Unfortunately, Intel ran into some trouble last month and the general rollout was delayed. AMD, which launched its own Fusion integrated CPU at about the same time, capitalised on Intel’s misstep.

Mobile chipsets are also becoming more powerful and providing what was desktop performance just a handful of years ago in low-power devices.

Companies: Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Marvell, Texas Instruments