Big Data remains one of the hottest topics in the industry due to the actual dollar value that businesses are deriving from making sense from tons of structured and unstructured data.  Virtually every field is leveraging a data-driven strategy as people, process, data and things are increasing being connected (Internet of Everything). New tools and techniques are being developed that can mine vast stores of data to inform decision making in ways that were previously unimagined.   The fact that we can derive more knowledge by joining related information and recognizing correlations can inform and enrich numerous aspects of every day life.  There's a good reason why Big Data is so hot!

This year at Hadoop Summit, Cisco invites you to learn how to unlock the value of Big Data. Unprecedented data creation opens the door to responsive applications and emerging analytics techniques and businesses need a better way to analyze data.  Cisco will be showcasing Infrastructure Innovations from both Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and Cisco Applications Centric Infrastructure (ACI).  Cisco's solution for deploying big data applications can help customers make informed decisions, act quickly, and achieve better business outcomes.

Cisco is partnering with leading software providers to offer a comprehensive infrastructure and management solution, based on Cisco UCS, to support our customers' big data initiatives.   Taking advantage of Cisco UCS's Fabric based infrastructure, Cisco can apply significant advantage to big data workloads.

The following graphic should help to bring clarity for at least one of the advantages of leveraging a fabric based infrastructure for Big Data, especially as you start to scale:

In fact, Cisco UCS can support up to 160 servers with a single pair of Fabric Interconnects and a fraction of the cables when compared to traditional network and compute architectures.

In addition, we'll be focusing on some best practices at Hadoop Summit for managing your rack server infrastructure, primarily by leveraging Cisco UCS Manager and Service Profiles, creating a state abstraction, even on a bare metal application such as Hadoop.  The TCO implications of this capability are enormous and we'll be happy to share this capability with you in a live demo.

If you haven't already heard about Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure, Hadoop Summit will offer you several opportunities to learn more about it.

For a quick introduction to ACI before the show, take a look at a recent episode of "Engineers Unplugged", entitled, ACI and Traditional Networking.

This is an amazing episode of Engineers Unplugged, where two technologists from the community, Hal Rottenberg (@halr9000) and Colin Lynch (@ucsguru) discuss how ACI disrupts traditional networking thinking while leveraging current networking skills. It's a great tutorial for anyone looking to understand what application centric infrastructure really means.

During Hadoop Summit, we'll also have a break out session, led by Samuel Kommu, Cisco Technical Marketing Engineer, on Wednesday, June 4th from 5:25 pm -6:05 pm, entitled, "Big Data Clusters Redefined".   We encourage you to attend this session to learn how Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) for Big Data next generation technologies can bring unprecedented simplicity, programmability and massive scalability to BigData clusters.  Topics discussed will help take a holistic approach to a BigData cluster design, enabling full potential of the cluster for BigData workloads.

Have you considered Cisco UCS or Cisco ACI for your Big Data projects?   I'd like to invite you to come and hear more on June 3rd -5th at Hadoop Summit in San Jose.    We'll have a number or demos and experts on hand to answer all of your questions.  Stop by and say hello and let me know if you have any comments or questions, or via twitter at@CicconeScott.