Disruptive Possibilities: How Big Data Changes Everything

Disruptive Possibilities: How Big Data Changes Everything

by Jeffrey Needham
Released June 2013
Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
ISBN: 9781449369675

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Book description

Big data has more disruptive potential than any information technology developed in the past 40 years. As author Jeffrey Needham points out in this revealing book, big data can provide unprecedented visibility into the operational efficiency of enterprises and agencies.

Disruptive Possibilities provides an historically-informed overview through a wide range of topics, from the evolution of commodity supercomputing and the simplicity of big data technology, to the ways conventional clouds differ from Hadoop analytics clouds. This relentlessly innovative form of computing will soon become standard practice for organizations of any size attempting to derive insight from the tsunami of data engulfing them.

Replacing legacy silos—whether they’re infrastructure, organizational, or vendor silos—with a platform-centric perspective is just one of the big stories of big data. To reap maximum value from the myriad forms of data, organizations and vendors will have to adopt highly collaborative habits and methodologies.

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Table of contents

  1. 1. The Wall of Water
    1. And Then There Was One
    2. Commercial Supercomputing Comes of Age
    3. A Stitch in Time
    4. The Yellow Elephant in the Room
    5. Scaling Yahoovians
    6. Supercomputers Are Platforms
    7. Big Data! Big Bang!
    8. Endless Possibilities
  2. 2. Big Data: The Ultimate Computing Platform
    1. Introduction to Platforms
    2. Come Fly with Me
    3. Computing Platforms
    4. The End of an Era
    5. Back to the Future
    6. High Divers and Fire Fighters
    7. I’ll Take Silos for $1000, Alex
    8. Engineering Big Data Platforms
    9. The Art and Craft of Platform Engineering at Global Scale
    10. KISS Me Kate
    11. The Response Time Continuum
    12. Perpetual Prototyping
    13. Epic Fail Insurance
    14. Optimize Absolutely Everything
    15. Mind the Gap
  3. 3. Organizations: The Other Platform
    1. From Myelin to Metal
    2. Silos
    3. Industrial Grain Elevators
    4. Platforms 1, Silos 0
    5. Panic! Now!
    6. Fear and Loathing
    7. Risky Business
    8. Probability and Outcome
    9. Quantitative Qualities
    10. The Soft Platform
  4. 4. The Reservoir of Data
    1. The Actual Internet
    2. Best of Inbred
    3. Drowning Not Waving
    4. Spinning Rust
    5. A Spectrum of Perishability
    6. Enclosed Water Towers
    7. The Big Data Water District
    8. The HDFS Reservoir
    9. Third Eye Blind
    10. Spectrum of Analytic Visibility
    11. The Cost of Flexibility
  5. 5. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs: When Clouds Meet Big Data
    1. The Big Tease
    2. Scalability 101
    3. Motherboards and Apple Pie
    4. Being and Nothingness
    5. Parity Is for Farmers
    6. Google in Reverse
    7. Isolated Thunderstorms
    8. Private Cloud Myths
    9. The Network Is the Backplane
    10. The Orientation of Clouds
    11. My Other Data Center Is an RV Park
    12. Converge Conventionally
  6. 6. Haystacks and Headgames
    1. The Demise of Counting
    2. Lose the Haystack
    3. Mind Another Gap
    4. Believing Is Seeing
    5. Spatial Intelligence
    6. Associative Supercomputing
    7. Back from the Future
    8. Acknowledgments

Product information

  • Title: Disruptive Possibilities: How Big Data Changes Everything
  • Author(s): Jeffrey Needham
  • Release date: June 2013
  • Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
  • ISBN: 9781449369675