Mat Mathews

It has been an exciting week here at Plexxi! Dr. Doug Comer spent the day with us on Wednesday learning about our products and new network architecture. Dr. Comer is an internationally recognized networking guru, widely known for his series of groundbreaking textbooks on computer networks, the Internet, computer operating systems and computer architecture (including the popular ‘Internetworking with TCP/IP’). He designed and implemented X25NET and Cypress networks as well as the Xinu operating system. He is currently a professor of computer science at Purdue University where he teaches courses on operating systems and computer networks. It was a pleasure having him at the Plexxi headquarters—we hope he learned as much from us as we did from him! Take a look at a few photos from his visit.

Below please find a few of our top picks for our favorite news articles of the week. Have a great Memorial Day weekend!

InfoWorld: 3 ways the data lake is actually not helping with IT agility
By Yves de Montcheuil
Loosely speaking, a data lake is the big data version of an operational data store, plus a network storage appliance, plus data processing/query engines, all combined — typically in a Hadoop cluster augmented by database engines. The concept of the data lake is simple: “pour” in it every record from any source you can find, and make all this data available to anyone who needs access. This way, there is no “loading bias” or “transformation bias” as to which data is useful and in which form. Everyone finds what they need. At least that’s the theory. But is the data lake really helping IT to get more agile, or is it actually slowing things down and making IT harder?

Windows IT Pro: IT Innovators: Hyper-Convergence 101
By Cheryl J. Ajluni
Hyper-convergence is one of those buzzwords you hear a lot about these days. It was identified by many industry observers as a key trend for 2015 and has been talked about in just about every storage and network-related conference thus far this year. Technology Business Research (TBR) even predicts that as part of the converged infrastructure market—projected to be a $17.8 billion vendor opportunity—hyper-converged systems will displace the piecemeal infrastructure that’s typically found in today’s data centers. But do you really know what hyper-convergence is and what it can mean for you and your data center in the years ahead?

IT Business Edge: New Types of Data Demand New Infrastructure
By Loraine Lawson
It’s a truism that technology changes quickly and ages fast — and yet, despite massive network and computer evolutions, not much changed for data until Big Data came along. To be fair, for all practical purposes, Big Data was first seen as a natural extension of the relational database, but with larger amounts of data and faster processing speed. Almost immediately, though, vendors like IBM and research firms like Gartner pushed the definition of Big Data to include other data types — semi-structured and unstructured data, delivered at high speeds, which can mean real time, near-time and streaming or, as I privately call it, all time data.

Forbes: Some Reality About Cloud From The Trenches Of Enteprise IT
By Ben Kepes
There exists something of a dichotomy in the cloud world. On the one hand, we have the cloud exemplars, the Netflix‘s of this world. We all hang on these companies’ every word and take their path to the cloud as a best practice approach. On the other hand, we tend to gloss over the reality in the trenches for enterprise IT. Netflix has very little in common with a traditional organization – it is an outlier and, as such, should be seen as an aspirational example, but perhaps not the model to follow.

What do you think? Share your opinions about these stories with us on Twitter.

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