Data Warehouse Appliance Hosts Hadoop On-Premises

Organizations considering deploying SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) and Hadoop may benefit from the Microsoft Analytics Platform System (APS), a new data warehouse appliance announced on Apr. 15, 2014. The APS combines analysis of structured data (such as sales data) in PDW with unstructured data (such as activity data from social networks) in Hadoop. The APS (an on-premises system) offers potential security, performance, and administration advantages over previous Hadoop deployment options. However, configuration of the Hadoop file system and data retrieval processes requires special skills not typically found in most organizations.

Analytics Platform System Hosts Big Data

Analysis of large, unstructured data sources (such as Web logs, blog posts, Facebook or Twitter feeds, and other sources) can provide business insights for many organizations. For example, understanding current consumer sentiment (as posted on the Web) about an organization’s products could provide insights for design changes and production and distribution planning. However, to achieve actionable insights, organizations might need to combine unstructured data with more structured data found in traditional databases, such as product and sales data, to enable further analysis with existing reporting and analysis tools. Deploying a solution to gather and organize unstructured data (Hadoop) and integrate it with structured, relational data sources (PDW) requires significant hardware investments and IT resources with special skills, which are barriers for many organizations.