Making Things Better—Not Just Bigger—With Big Data Solutions

[AngelaHarvey]

Coming into the Big Data world, it’s easy to get excited about the opportunities Big Data can bring. But you have to be careful not to throw out the proverbial baby with the bath water and just look at focus new solutions like Hadoop or NoSQL as replacements for existing tools. You need to look at the big picture, the business needs, and how you can do things better.

 

Having had the pleasure of leading SAP’s BI & Big Data GTM for a little over a year now, it’s apparent to me that Big Data’s not better when just taken alone. Big Data is only better when it complements your existing, traditional infrastructure to tackle new use cases or business challenges.

 

SAP IT Operations Analytics (SAP ITOA), our new analytical offering for IT, [check it out here] makes life easier for IT Operations by giving a true real-time and holistic view on everything happening in the data center, from Compute, to Network, to Backup and Storage.  Let’s look at an example, in the past the Storage team may be trying to schedule a backup that keeps failing. Maybe a server their job is scheduled to is down and another team is working to resolve, but since they didn’t have a line of site into each other’s monitoring tools you ended up with two teams working in parallel to solve the same issue. Or worse, a 3am all-hands with a lot of finger pointing. SAP ITOA makes it easy to see events, configuration, and telemetry data across the IT landscape for quicker root-cause analysis. Having a clear line of site across IT also makes resource planning and optimization a lot easier. And you can even use built-in predictive analytics to understand expected performance and take action when it deviates.

 

But while the ITOA category is new, data center monitoring is certainly not. So much like in our data source example, SAP IT Operations Analytics leverages and enhances what you already have and are comfortable using. Rather than replacing tools like Nagios, CA, BMC etc. that do an extremely good job of what they do at a given level and for a given team, combine their information into a single ITOA dashboard. Each group within IT can keep using what works for them, but there can also be line of sight to other areas. Additionally, SAP ITOA lets you enrich event data with customer data and more, so you can understand the business impact of an outage and prioritize accordingly.

 

Big Data helps you run your business better when you focus on the better, enhancing what you already have, rather than ripping and replacing everything. Personally I think this is a much less daunting task.

 

You can learn more about how SAP ITOA enhances SAP’s IT March 8^th. Register here.