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Big Data
Past, Present & Future
Where are We Headed?
Rob Peglar
CTO Americas
Isilon Storage Division
EMC Corporation
rob.peglar@emc.com
@peglarr

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• In order to understand what’s coming, we must
understand our past
• We must also understand that
Big Data is fundamentally
different than what we’re used to
• Consider the difference between a still photograph
and a movie – and our human perception of them
– More than a collection of still photographs – why?
Prediction is Very Difficult -
Especially About the Future
- Niels Bohr

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The Past –
and I Mean the Past
• Consider the census…
• From the Latin “censere”
– meaning “to estimate”
• “In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all
the world should be registered.” Luke 2:1
• The Domesday Book of 1086 – England
– Comprehensive tally of people, their land, and property
• The US Constitution mandates a decennial census
– The 1880 census took eight years (!) to complete
• This led to Hollerith’s punched card tabulator in 1890
– The beginning of automated data processing
– Reduced the census time to one year

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Sampling – Good or Bad?
• Sampling precision improves optimally
with randomness
– Not sample size
– Jerzy Neyman (Poland, 1934) proved this
• Neyman, J.(1934) "On the two different aspects of the representative method: The method of stratified sampling and the method of purposive selection", Journal of
the Royal Statistical Society, 97 (4), 557–625
• Good - Sampling was a solution to information overload
• Bad - Systematic bias in sampling gives wrong conclusions
• A seismic shift is occurring – from
– Sampling, keeping datasets small on purpose, using them once…to
– N=all, keeping datasets large on purpose, using them many times
• Why? The outliers are the most interesting!
– Examples – credit card fraud, language translation, insurability
– Don’t just follow the rules, look for the exceptions
Williams
Tube
1946
1024 bits

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The Journey from
Clean to Messy
• 1998 – Linden et al, collaborative
filtering patent, working at a Seattle startup selling books
online
– G. Linden J. Jacobi and E. Benson, Collaborative Recommendations Using Item-to-Item Similarity Mappings, US Patent 6,266,649 (to Amazon.com),
Patent and Trademark Office, Washington, D.C., 2001
• “If it works perfectly, Amazon should show you just one
book – the next one you will buy.” (Linden)
• Hypothesis-driven approach becomes data-driven
– “Proving” something (causation)  correlation
• McGregor et al – using big data to improve the NICU
– 16 data streams, 1,260 data points/sec
– Valid improvement of premature infant adverse outcomes
– No “proof” – it helps doctors make better diagnostic decisions
– Carolyn McGregor, "Big Data in Neonatal Intensive Care," Computer, vol. 46, no. 6, pp. 54-59, June 2013, doi:10.1109/MC.2013.157

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Manholes and Raw Data - Correlations
• 94,000 miles of underground cable in NYC, 51,000 manholes in
just Manhattan w/service boxes below
• 1 in 20 cables laid before 1930; some Edison-era
• Records kept since 1880’s – 38 different terms
– All hand-written, paper, cards, ledgers, etc.
• 2008 - How to prevent fires, exploding manholes?
• Machine-correlate 106 predictors of imminent disaster
– Top 10% predicted were 44% of total failures
• Chris Anderson – “data deluge makes scientific method obsolete”
– http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory
• “Datafication” – everything is data
– Numbers to words to images to locations to relationships to feelings …
– Graph theory & graph analysis changes the way we perceive the world

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7© Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.© Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
The Present - Architecture
BUSINESS PROCESSINFO PROCESSINGDATA ACQUISITIONDATA CREATION
END USERSANALYSTS / SCIENTISTSARCHITECTS / ENGINEERSPRODUCERS
Shared Nothing
Scale-out Storage + SSD
MPP + In-Memory
Compute
Hadoop
Hi-Speed / -
Resiliency
Networking
Converged
Infrastructure
Cloud
Non-relational
DWH
SYSTEMS INTEGRATION
VOLUMEVELOCITYVARIETY
OBJECTIVES
Stream Processing
Event Management
Data Exploration
Contextualized Data
Modeling / Scenarios
Forecasting
DELIVERY MODELS
Access-Anywhere
Analytics Services
Context-Aware
Business Applications
ON-DEMAND
Location-Based
Services
Alert and
Respond
PUSH
Workflow and
Interaction
Automation
Smart devices
and systems
EMBEDDED
Email and
Messaging
Mobile Apps Data
Transaction and
Usage Logs
Machine and
Sensors
Geolocation
Relationships and
Social Influence
Real-time
Events
Deep
Insights
VALUE

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The Present – Business Value of Data
• Data is valuable – re-use of data even more so
– Not ephemeral value – can be re-consumed ad infinitum
– Economists call this a “non-rivalrous” good
• Cost/benefit of storage ~ 0 – so keep everything
– Ewan Birney, European Biomatics Information Institute, “Hidden Treasures
In Junk DNA” http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=hidden-treasures-in-junk-dna
– Last 50 years, cost/byte ~1/2x every 2 years
– Density has increased ~50 million times since 1956
• Consider electric cars:
– Battery level indicates when to “fill up” from the power grid
– Power utility monitors grid usage over time
– Correlate both data sets together
• Determine when/where to build recharge stations on which roads
• Recombinant data
– “Old” data combined into new forms for new insights
– “Noisy” datasets enable feedback loops – e.g. better/faster search/index

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The Future 1 – Wild, Wild West?
• Can we treat data as a corporate asset?
– A ledger entry, like “brand value” (intangible)
– Or is data a tangible asset to be kept on the books?
– Does data have “cash value”? Asset amortization?
– Can a business be legally “liable” for its data collection?
• Facebook book-valued at $6.3B. IPO value: $104B
– Why the difference? Facebook is essentially data
– Or, every FB user is worth ~ $100 (~1B subscribers)
• We will see much more “data value chain” ahead
– Ingest, analyze, sell results, analyze, sell results …downstreaming
– Licensing of data in its infancy – much more to come
– Think about the data just from your car – 40 uPs

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The Future 2 – Data as Policy -
Can Data save Us from Us?
• “In God We Trust – all others bring data”
– Commonly attributed to W. Edward Deming
• New jobs/titles coming out of the woodwork
– CAO (Chief Analytics Officer), CDO (Data)
– Data Scientist, Data Correlationist, Data Ethicist
• Knowing “what” not “why” is good enough. Is it?
• Remember Bayes’ “inductive probability” (250 yrs!)
– We update our beliefs about something as new data arrives
– Bayes T. (1763) "An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances". Phil. Trans., 53, 370–418.
• Data Policy in the immortal words of Yogi Berra:
– “We make too many wrong mistakes”
– “You can observe a lot just by watching.”

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The Future 3 – N=all?
Keep Everything? Seriously?
• Data Silos or the Data Lake?
– HDFS presents a crisis: i.e. 危機, weiji
• dangerous ‘critical point’ (not crisis; mis-translation)
– Write-once, read-many, modify-never; delete-never?
– Time is not your friend when moving data
• (So, don’t move it between repositories; move it to the CPU)
• One 40GE NIC yields same rate on bus as 28 disks @ 140MB/s
• One million seconds is 277.7 hours (~ 11.5 days)
• 1 PB @ 1 GB/sec is … 1 EB @ 1 TB/sec is …
• Non-shared (1 protocol) or shared (N protocols)?
• Time versus Space – the Essential Judgment
• Cost of Having Data vs. Cost of Not Having Data

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THANK YOU