Columbia Business School’s Center on Global Brand Leadership and the New York American Marketing Association (NYAMA) recently published their research on role of data and analytics in Marketing. Their report titled, "Marketing ROI in the Era of Big Data",provides key insights into how enterprises are applying Big Data analytics in their marketing decisions.

To me the most important finding of this study is the gap between desire and reality.

While 91% want to be data driven in their decisions, it has not yet reflected in practice

Enterprises have been collecting data for long time. What has changed now is the volume, different types of  data (variety) and how fast it is changing (velocity).  In my own conversations I find many enterprises believe more data is not...

Unstructured data growth is exploding. According to Gartner, the growth of data is 40% to 60%, but for unstructured data in the enterprise, the growth rate can be up to 80% (2011). With this challenge in mind and after months of collaboration, NetApp and Symantec have developed Symantec Data Insight - a solution that integrates with NetApp storage systems, among others, to discover and collect data activity and permissions in unstructured data in order to improve an organization's data governance objectives. Data Insight is also integrated into Symantec Data Loss Prevention enabling organizations to discover, monitor and protect confidential information residing in CIFS and NFS file shares on NetApp storage systems.

To learn more, download the free joint-whitepaper from NetApp and Symantec entitled "...

A funny thing happened the other day when I went to one of my favorite sites to look up a word...I saw the above message, but looking at the redirect URL, it says "failover-namechangedtoprotecttheinnocent.com". Now, far be it from me to be correcting the vocabulary of a site whose stock in trade is word definitions, but in the high availability biz, that is NOT what we mean by "failover". A failover is when you have a service under HA cluster control, and in the event of a failure, that service is relocated to another server in the cluster. In its entirety.

Clearly there was some attempt made at protecting the service, otherwise my browser would have just thrown an error saying the site wasn't available. But it's just as clear that protection wasn't extended to the entire business service. We...

I've been blogging over the past couple of weeks under the theme "Everything you think you know about clustering is wrong". It's sort of a tongue-in-cheek theme, but the misconceptions I was trying to dispel are real and held by enough people that I felt they were worth addressing. But now I want to shift gears a little bit.

In my last post, I mentioned how a lot of people can't seem to break out of the late-1990s mindset of 2-node active/passive failover HA:

While large clusters meant we no longer needed two nodes for every critical application, many people's mindsets were still stuck in 1997 and they continued to view HA clustering in a 2-node, active/passive context.

To be sure, that's definitely not the case with all of our customers, especially...