Big data trends revealed

The company’s report, ‘Big data – Thematic Research’, details how big data is the result of a combination of technology trends, including, but not limited to, the ubiquity of mobile devices, widespread use of social media, and the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT).

Listed below are the leading big data technology trends, identified by GlobalData.

Edge computing

Specific use cases of edge computing include the maintenance of data processing and analytics close to points of collection. The growth of edge computing is therefore closely associated with the IoT. The proliferation of enterprise IoT initiatives and consumer IoT offerings will drive demand for edge computing solutions.

Quantum computing

The race to reach quantum supremacy is well underway, with Google, IBM, and Microsoft leading the pack. Artificial intelligence (AI), and particularly machine learning, will benefit, as quantum computers will complete extremely complex calculations, involving large data sets in a fraction of the time.

AI chips

Central processing units (CPUs) have powered data centres for decades, but new workloads stemming from technology such as AI and the IoT are pushing CPU architectures to their limits. Graphics processing units (GPUs) can process many threads in parallel, making them ideal for training and modelling of large predictive data models.

Data centre interconnect (DCI)

As more data centres come on line worldwide, the need to transfer data between them at increasingly high speeds also grows. As a result, the DCI market faces huge demand for ever-faster optical links and transceivers. These data transfer speeds are especially important at the DCI level since 70% of all data centre traffic is east-west traffic, and therefore has a marked effect on the overall speed of the data centre.

Silicon photonics

Silicon photonics is an emerging technology that combines laser and silicon technology on the same chip. It allows data to be transferred between computer chips by optical rays and supports faster interconnects between data centres. Photonic chip technology is still in beta development. Cisco, Intel, and Inphi are prominent vendors in this market.

Serverless computing

Companies that have outsourced their servers to cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) companies, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), typically pay in advance for the amount of server capacity they require for process execution. However, IaaS is fast being replaced by serverless computing, whereby the cloud provider dynamically manages the allocation of code execution resources. Serverless architectures enable developers to outsource the hardware and focus on developing value-adding code.

High performance computing (HPC)

HPC is one of the fastest-growing segments of the computing hardware market. China dominates this segment, thereby supporting AI, space, defence, industrial design, gaming, and genomics industries. The unveiling of the Sunway TaihuLight System in 2016 was a genuine breakthrough. Meanwhile, Huawei, Lenovo, and Inspur are aggressively competing against IBM and HPE in the enterprise and cloud transaction processing space.

3D sensors

A handy by-product from optical interconnect technology are 3D sensors, which will witness phenomenal growth because of themes such as augmented reality (AR), AI, and autonomous vehicles. In some AR systems, advanced 3D-sensing cameras use vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) systems for tracking objects and sensing 3D depth. This means that leading suppliers of VCSEL laser systems could get a significant boost over the next year or so.

Software defined networking (SDN)

SDN is an architecture for data networks that allows software, rather than hardware, to control the network path along which data packets flow. It is hugely disruptive because it fundamentally changes who controls the data centre.

Container software

On the open source software front, the most important development is the arrival of operating system container software. They enable applications to be easily moved between different IT infrastructures. The key benefits of container technology include significant cost savings, reduced time to deployment, better scalability, and flexibility to port to other infrastructures. Leaders in container management software include Docker’s Swarm, Google’s open-sourced Kubernetes, Red Hat’s OpenShift, and Amazon’s Blox.

Real-time analytics

The combination of streaming data and analytics has the potential to generate value for companies.

5G

The full-scale mainstream adoption of 5G has the potential to increase data consumption globally. 5G is expected to enable faster speeds and connect around one million devices per square kilometer. GlobalData estimates that, by 2024, more than one-quarter of all data traffic will be carried over 5G, up from less than 1% in 2019.