Data Where You Want It

Chapter 1. Why Geo-Distribution Matters

“Data where you want it; compute where you need it.”

Thirty years ago, if someone in North America or Europe mentioned they had accepted a position at a Tokyo-based firm, your first question likely would’ve been, “When are you relocating to Tokyo?” Today the question has become, “Are you planning to relocate?” Remote communication combined with frequent flights have left the question open in global business teams.

Just as we now think differently about how people work together, so too a shift is needed in how we build and use global data infrastructure in order to address modern business challenges. We need systems that allow data to live where it should. We should be able to think of data—on premise or in the cloud—as part of a global system. In short, our data infrastructure should give us data that can be accessed where, when, and by whom we want, and not by anyone else.

The idea of working with data centers that are geographically distant isn’t new. There’s an emerging need among many big data organizations for globally distributed but still cohesive data that meets the challenges of consistency, low latency, ease of administration, and low cost, even at huge scale.

In the past, many people built organizations around a central headquarters plus regional teams that functioned independently, each with its own regional database, possibly reporting back to HQ monthly or weekly. Data was copied and backed up at a remote location for disaster ...