Cloud Computing: What Exactly Is Big Data, Anyway?
August 14, 2013
Grazed from Epoch Times. Author: Kannan Sankaran.
We live in a time where nearly everyone is participating in creating a very large amount of data everyday—from engaging with social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, to watching videos in multimedia sites like YouTube and Vimeo, to performing searches using Google and Bing. What happens to this data? Where does it get stored? How does it all become relevant? Understanding big data gives us the answer. To understand big data, it is essential to first know about the three main Vs of data – Volume, Variety, and Velocity, as outlined by Doug Laney of Gartner Inc. in a report in February 2001:
1) Volume – It refers to the volume of data that is being stored everyday by companies, in data centers. According to StatisticBrain.com, a staggering 58 million tweets are sent out each day that is stored by Twitter.
2) Variety – This refers to the collection of data in various structured and unstructured formats like GPS sensors, images, videos, and blog posts. My personal Samsung Galaxy Note 2 phone has numerous sensors that are also contributing to this data…
3) Velocity – It refers to the speed at which data is analyzed by companies to provide a better user experience. If I am not able to get Google search results in a few seconds, I get impatient.
Since then, a lot more Vs including Veracity, Validity, and Volatility have been added by numerous companies as they started using big data technologies…
Read more from the source @ http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/242577-understanding-big-data/