Alastair TurnerAlastair Turner


Integrated big data platforms for structured and unstructured data offer organisations the ability to analyse the entire spectrum of available data – from traditional board reports to social media – from one unified perspective.

, technical architect, Greenplum Division, EMC Southern Africa, says the ability to unify these processes, enriching one from the other, is catapulting big data from an overwhelming challenge to a potential for competitive advantage.

“Big data is growing beyond the performance capacity of traditional data warehouse and database management systems. It’s challenging businesses to adopt new analytics and architectures to realise business value, and researchers are using big data to prevent disease, combat crime and empower the developing world,” he says.

“With the technology mentioned above, all this is possible, and it’s the way companies deal with their big data that’s important. From a holistic point of view, the time to insight is simply quicker. CEOs and CIOs get answers to their questions far more rapidly, and those answers are based on accurate, meaningful, real-time information.”

According to Turner, EMC is well positioned for this evolutionary phase in managing the vast volumes of data generated by the world’s corporations and individuals. In fact, EMC Greenplum is driving the future of data warehousing and analytics with breakthrough products including Greenplum Database, the Greenplum HD enterprise distribution of Hadoop, and Greenplum Chorus – the industry’s first enterprise data cloud platform.

“These products embody the power of open systems, cloud computing, virtualisation and social collaboration – enabling global organisations to gain greater insight and value from their data than ever before possible,” Turner says.

“The EMC Greenplum Database continues to be at the core of driving big data insights and decisions for our customers. As more organisations create data-driven cultures, the Greenplum Database’s shared-nothing, massively parallel processing (MPP) makes business intelligence and analytical processing much faster. It is this analytic productivity that is the real benefit of the database and is something we’re proud to offer.”

The Greenplum Data Computing Appliance (DCA) offers the power of a massively parallel processing architecture, while delivering the fastest data-loading rate and the best price/performance ratio in the industry – without the complexity and constraints of proprietary hardware. It is a unified big data analytics appliance; a modular solution for structured data, unstructured data, and Greenplum partner applications such as business intelligence and extract, transform and load.