Analyzing Big Data

Big data is a more common occurrence, largely triggered by the growing usefulness of social media for business purposes. There is a vast amount of information on Social media sites about customers, competitors and others that a company can make use of in policy formulation. But they need to analyze the data carefully and rigorously. This requires a lot of computing power.

Normally such computing has been done on large computers in the cloud. PCs would be nice, but they don't have enough RAM capacity to hold the data being analyzed, especially if it is in graphical form.

A logical answer is to create virtual RAM using a PC’s hard drive, which are being made in very large sizes. New software is beginning to use this technique, as evidenced by this article about GraphChi, which is designed for this very purpose. Software like this will give companies an advantage of being able to do their own analysis on their own computers on a secure basis, which should appeal to a number of companies.