Related Technologies - Big Data: Related Technologies, Challenges and Future Prospects - page 15

On one hand, the widespread deployment of IoT drives the high growth of data
both in quantity and category, thus providing the opportunity for the application and
development of big data. On the other hand, the application of big data technology
to IoT also accelerates the research advances and business models of IoT.

2.3 Data Center

In the big data paradigm, a data center is not only an organization for concentrated
storage of data, but also undertakes more responsibilities, such as acquiring data,
managing data, organizing data, and leveraging the data values and functions. Data
centers are mainly concerned with “data” other than “center.” A data center has
masses of data and organizes and manages data according to its core objective and
development path, which is more valuable than owning a good site and resource.
The emergence of big data brings about abundant development opportunities and
great challenges to data centers.

￿ Big data requires data center provide powerful backstage support. The big data

paradigm has more stringent requirements on storage capacity and processing
capacity, as well as network transmission capacity. Enterprises must take the
development of data centers into consideration to improve the capacity of rapidly
and effectively processing of big data under limited price/performance ratio. The
data center shall provide the infrastructure with a large number of nodes, build a
high-speed internal network, effectively dissipate heat, and effective backup data.
Only when a highly energy-efficient, stable, safe, expandable, and redundant data
center is built, the normal operation of big data applications may be ensured.

￿ The growth of big data applications accelerates the revolution and innovation of

data centers. Many big data applications have developed their unique architec-
tures and directly promote the development of storage, network, and computing
technologies related to data center. With the continued growth of structured
and unstructured data, and the variety of sources of analytical data, the data
processing and computing capacities of the data center shall be greatly enhanced.
In addition, as the scale of data center is increasingly expanding, it is also an
important issue on how to reduce the operational cost for the development of
data centers.

￿ Big data endows more functions to data centers. In the big data paradigm, a data

center shall not only be concerned with hardware facilities but also strengthen
soft capacities, i.e., the capacities of acquisition, processing, organization,
analysis, and application of big data. The data center may help business personnel
analyze the existing data, discover problems in business operation, and develop
solutions from big data.

Big data is an emerging paradigm, which will promote the explosive growth
of the infrastructure and related software of data center. The physical data center
network is the core for supporting big data, but, at present, is the key infrastructure
that is most urgently in need [ 3 ].