Fast data meets fast performance: Optimizing data analytics for IoT

According to Gartner, the Internet of Things (IoT) is the second most important technology trend for 2015. The potential opportunities and disruptions that IoT will bring are sometimes referred to as the “next generation” of the Internet. Analytics derived from IoT data can help businesses solve problems before they happen, while also reducing the cost of operations and maintenance.

The ability to derive real-time insights from IoT data can generate positive value for the bottom line, but how will IT leaders manage the onslaught of data analytics that the new IoT world will demand?

Optimizing data analytics for IoT
IoT data isn’t the same as big data, so the same tools and functions are simply not equipped to handle it. IoT data is bigger, faster and originates from all over the world – hence the term “fast data”.

In order to perform the necessary analysis of fast data, the right infrastructure is critical. IoT analytics platforms must be highly responsive, scalable and efficient in order to not only ingest data quickly, but also analyze it in real time. IoT data is truly a case where even slight deviations in infrastructure performance can have drastic effects on your business operations. Here are a few ways that we at Internap approach this:

1. Choose performance. While many organizations begin in a virtual cloud environment, they eventually run into performance challenges and cost constraints as the business scales. Choosing dedicated bare-metal servers can deliver up to 8x better performance, and this will be critical for maintaining a reliable IoT analytics platform. In benchmarking tests of the ParStream platform on Internap bare-metal servers, query response time was 2x faster and 40% less expensive than AWS EC2. When your business relies on instant response times for ad-hoc queries of more than 26 billion records, you can’t afford to compromise on performance.

2. Right-size your infrastructure. IT professionals must understand their IoT use case and application workload to determine the best-suited infrastructure. This often calls for a hybrid deployment approach to incorporate different environments that ensure optimal performance, including a mix of cloud and colocation.

3. Future proof. Where is your business today, and where does it need to be in the future? As a contributor to the open source ecosystem, we believe that standards matter, and our portfolio is designed to enable customers to get value from optimal performance. Along with hybridization, this approach can enable IT professionals to build a future-proof infrastructure that can adapt to changing business and technology needs.

The IoT will give rise to new advancements in technology and innovation. Will you be ready?

To learn more about optimizing data analytics for IoT, download the report, Benchmarking ParStream SQL Database on Bare Metal and Virtual Cloud.