Intel advances next phase of big data intelligence: Real time analytics

Friday, 21 February 2014 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Intel Xeon Processor E7 v2 family delivers industry’s most advanced technology for in-memory analytics to accelerate major business transformations

SANTA CLARA, Calif.: To help companies in a variety of industries from retail and healthcare to banking and transportation turn data into actionable insights, Intel Corporation introduced the Intel Xeon processor E7 v2 family earlier this week. Using analytics enables businesses to make decisions that improve top-line and bottom-line results. The Intel Xeon processor E7 v2 family delivers new capabilities to process and analyse large, diverse amounts of data to unlock information that was previously inaccessible. “Organisations that leverage data to accelerate business insights will have a tremendous edge in this economy,” said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Data Centre Group. “The advanced performance, memory capacity and reliability of the Intel Xeon processor E7 v2 family enable IT organisations to deliver real-time analysis of large datasets to spot and capitalise on trends, create new services and deliver business efficiency.” Big data and the Internet of Things (IoT) are providing enormous opportunities for many organisations to grow as they create revenue-generating services from the information they are able to derive. The big data technology and services market is expected to grow 27 percent annually through 2017 to reach $32.4 billion. A leading driver of this growth is the immense amount of data coming from connected devices making up the IoT, which is projected to grow to 30 billion devices by 2020. Investments in the highest performing technologies and analysis solution scan also deliver significant cost savings. For example, Intel’s IT organisation expects to achieve cost savings and increased bottom-line revenue of nearly half a billion dollars through use of analytics solutions by 2016. New big data processing and analytics capabilities with relentless reliability The Intel Xeon processor E7 v2 family has triple the memory capacity of the previous generation processor family, allowing much faster and thorough data analysis. In-memory analytics places and analyses an entire data set – such as an organisation’s entire customer database – in the system memory rather than on traditional disk drives. This method is gaining in popularity due to the increased need for more complex analytics. Industry analyst firm Gartner expects 35% of mid- to large-sized companies will adopt in-memory analytics by 2015, up from 10% in 2012 and predicts at least 50% of Global 2000 companies will use in-memory computing to deliver significant additional benefits from investments in enterprise resource planning (ERP). EBay, one of the world’s largest and most complex online marketplaces, handles massive datasets of more than 50 petabytes (PB) for more than 100 million users. Based on initial testing of the new Intel Xeon processor E7 v2 and SAP’s HANA in-memory analytics software, eBay has seen greater performance and understanding of larger data sets that will help drive additional revenue opportunities for its customers. Built for up to 32-socket servers, with configurations supporting up to 15 processing cores and up to 1.5 terabytes (TB) of memory per socket, the new processor family achieves twice the average performance of the previous generation. These enhancements help businesses that run mission critical applications including business support systems (BSS), customer relationship management (CRM), and ERP to operate more efficiently, at lower cost and with faster response times. For example, a sales team with these capabilities can maximise revenue by pinpointing the best time to sell a product, or let an oil and gas company better predict when its platforms require preventative maintenance. To reduce data bottlenecks, the Intel Xeon Processor E7 v2 family features Intel Integrated I/O, Intel Data Direct I/O and support for PCIe 3.0, achieving up to four times the I/O bandwidth over the previous generation and providing extra capacity for storage and networking connections. System uptime and reliability also remains a key requirement for mission critical applications. The Intel Xeon Processor E7 v2 family continues Intel’s tradition of delivering world-class reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS). Intel Run Sure Technology is designed for “five nines” solutions essential for business-critical data by reducing the frequency and cost of planned and unplanned downtime. Extensive industry support Starting yesterday, 21 system manufacturers from around the world will announce more than 40 Intel Xeon processor E7 v2 family-based platforms. These manufacturers include Asus, Bull, Cisco, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, Huawei, IBM, Inspur, Lenovo, NEC, Oracle, PowerLeader, Quanta, SGI, Sugon, Supermicro, Unisys and ZTE. Numerous analytics software vendors also support Xeon processor E7 v2 family-based platforms, including Altibase, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Pivotal, QlikView, Red Hat, SAP, SAS, Software AG, Splunk, Sungard, Teradata, TongTech, Vertica and YonYou.