Let’s drill down into the metaphor.
Moor Insights & Strategy argues that an optimally tuned infrastructure is key to deriving all the rich benefits that go along with effective data management and analytics. They claim that data is the new crude oil and intelligence is the new gasoline, fueling business wins. If we break down this metaphor, it becomes clear that servers play a pivotal role in data management and analytics.
It starts with data. Lots of it. If you’re like most companies, you’re probably drowning in data. But raw data brings little value to your organization. It’s through processing and refining that data into intelligence where the value is created. Crude oil must be refined into gasoline to deliver value to the combustion engine. The same thing is true with data. Raw data must be refined into intelligence to achieve business outcomes and attain actionable insights.
If only this process were as simple as proceeding directly from Point A (raw data) to Point B (intelligence). There is an important middle step involving your IT infrastructure. You’re probably already aware of the power of popular data management and analytics applications such as Microsoft SQL Server and SAP HANA for making sense of the data chaos. There are many others that play a role.
However, what you may not have realized is that these applications are only as good as the hardware they run on. If apps are the industrial workers bringing order to your data, servers are the refinery juggernauts upon which the whole process relies. As Moor Insights puts it, “Without the right infrastructure, businesses will never realize the full benefits of real-time analytics.”[1]
Recent ESG research bears this out: Organizations with modern servers and infrastructure are nearly 7x more likely than organizations with aging servers to report their analytics environments are “very effective” at driving business value. Businesses with modern servers are also 5.3x more likely to report that their research and development function is market leading.[2] In the important process of refining data into actionable intelligence, servers matter.
Moor Insights outlines major infrastructure considerations you should keep top of mind:
- Processor core count and per core performance. More cores can process more data and fast performing cores crunch that data more quickly.
- Processor optimizations. These can provide noteworthy performance gains in data analysis.
- Memory bandwidth and memory capacity. How much data can be stored and how quickly it can be moved are a key factor.
- Location of data. The shorter distance data sets must travel to get to compute, the faster your intelligence can be gleaned and used as fuel for your business.
By Hilary Turner
Published with permission from https://blog.dellemc.com/en-us/