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8 Big Data Pain Points and How to Address Them - Part 2

Kamesh Pemmaraju

There are many pain points that companies experience when they try to deploy and run Big Data applications in their complex environments or use public or private cloud platforms, and there are also some best practices companies can use to address those pain points. Here are 5 more pain points and corresponding best practices.

Start with 8 Big Data Pain Points and How to Address Them - Part 1

PAIN POINT 4 – BIG DATA TOOLS EXPLOSION AND DEPLOYMENT COMPLEXITY

In the past decade, technologies such as Hadoop and MapReduce have become common frameworks to speed up processing of large datasets by breaking up them up into small fragments, running them in distributed farms of storage and processors clusters, and then collating the results back for consumption. Companies like Cloudera, Hortonworks and others have addressed many of the challenges associated with scheduling, cluster management, resource and data sharing, and performance tuning of these tools. And typically, such deployments are optimized to run on bare metal or on virtualization platforms like VMware, and therefore tend to remain in their own silo because of the complexity of deploying and operating these environments.

Modern big data use cases, however, need a whole bunch of other technologies and tools. You have Docker. You have Kubernetes. You have Spark. You have NoSQL Databases such as Cassandra and MongoDB. And when you get into machine learning you have several options.

Deploying Hadoop, which is quite complex, is one thing, arguably made relatively easy by companies like Cloudera and Hortonworks, but then if you need to deploy Cassandra or MongoDB, you have to put in effort to write scripts to deploy them. And depending on the target platform (bare metal, VMware, Microsoft), you will need to maintain and run multiple scripts. You then have to figure out how to network the Hadoop cluster with the Cassandra cluster and of course, inevitably, deal with DNS services, load balancers, firewalls, etc. Add other Big Data tools to be deployed, managed, and integrated, and you will begin to appreciate the challenge.

IT teams should address this challenge with a unifying platform that can not only deploy multiple Big Data tools and platforms from a curated "application and big data catalog," but also provide a way to virtualize all the underlying infrastructure resources along with an infrastructure-as-code framework via open API access This greatly simplifies the IT burden when it comes to provisioning the underlying infrastructure resources, and end users can simply deploy the tools they want and need with a single click and have the ability to use APIs to automate their deployment, provisioning, and configuration challenges.

PAIN POINT 5 – ONE BIG DATA CLUSTER DOESN'T ADDRESS ALL NEEDS

Organizations have diverse Big Data teams, production and R&D portfolios, and sometimes conflicting requirements for performance, data locality, cost, or specialized hardware resources. One single, standardized data cluster is not going to meet all of those needs. Companies will need to deploy multiple, independent Big Data clusters with possibly different underlying CPU, memory, and storage footprints. One cluster could be dedicated and fine-tuned for a Hadoop deployment with high local storage IOPS requirements, another may be running Spark jobs with more CPU and memory-bound configurations, and others like machine learning will need GPU infrastructure. Deploying and managing the complexity of such multiple diverse clusters will place a high operational overhead on the IT team, reducing their ability to respond quickly to Big Data user requests, and making it difficult to manage costs and maintain operational efficiency.

To address this pain point, the IT team should again have a unified orchestration/management platform and be able to set up logical business units that can be assigned to different Big Data teams. This way, each team gets full self-service capability within quota limits imposed by the IT staff, and each team can automatically deploy its own Big Data tools with a few clicks, independently of other teams.

PAIN POINT 6: SKYROCKETING IT OPERATIONS COSTS

Developing, deploying, and operating large-scale enterprise big data clusters can get complex, especially if it involves multiple sites, multiple teams, and diverse infrastructure, as we have seen. The operational overhead of these systems can be expensive and manually time-consuming. For example, IT operations teams still need to set up firewalls, load balancers, DNS services, and VPN services, to name a few. They still need to manage infrastructure operations such as physical host maintenance, disk additions/removals/replacements, and physical host additions/removals/replacements. They still need to do capacity planning, and they still need to monitor utilization, allocation, and performance of compute, storage, and networking.

IT teams should look for a solution that addresses this operational overhead through automation and the use of modern SaaS-based management portals that help the teams optimize sizing, perform predictive capacity planning, and implement seamless failure management.

PAIN POINT 7 – CONSISTENT POLICY-DRIVEN SECURITY AND CUSTOMIZATION REQUIREMENTS

Enterprises have policies around using their specifically hardened and approved gold images of operating systems. The operating systems often need to have security configurations, databases, and other management tools installed before they can be used. Running these on public cloud may not be allowed, or they may run very slowly.

The solution is to enable an on-premises data center image store where enterprises can create customized gold images. Using fine-grained RBAC, the IT team can share these images selectively with various development teams around the world based on the local security, regulatory, and performance requirements. The local Kubernetes deployments are then carried out using these gold images to provide the underlying infrastructure to run containers.

PAIN POINT 8 – DR STRATEGY FOR EDGE COMPUTING AND BIG DATA CLUSTERS

Any critical application and the data associated with it needs to be protected from natural disasters regardless of whether or not these apps are based on containers. None of the existing solutions provides an out-of-the-box disaster recovery feature for critical edge computing clusters or Big Data analytics applications. Customers are left to cobble together their own DR strategy.

As part of a platform's multi-site capabilities, IT teams should be able to perform remote data replication and disaster recovery between remote geographically-separated sites. This protects persistent data and databases used by these clusters.

Infrastructure management for Big Data projects can be extremely complex, but with centralized management of virtualized or cloud-based resources, it can be far easier.

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8 Big Data Pain Points and How to Address Them - Part 2

Kamesh Pemmaraju

There are many pain points that companies experience when they try to deploy and run Big Data applications in their complex environments or use public or private cloud platforms, and there are also some best practices companies can use to address those pain points. Here are 5 more pain points and corresponding best practices.

Start with 8 Big Data Pain Points and How to Address Them - Part 1

PAIN POINT 4 – BIG DATA TOOLS EXPLOSION AND DEPLOYMENT COMPLEXITY

In the past decade, technologies such as Hadoop and MapReduce have become common frameworks to speed up processing of large datasets by breaking up them up into small fragments, running them in distributed farms of storage and processors clusters, and then collating the results back for consumption. Companies like Cloudera, Hortonworks and others have addressed many of the challenges associated with scheduling, cluster management, resource and data sharing, and performance tuning of these tools. And typically, such deployments are optimized to run on bare metal or on virtualization platforms like VMware, and therefore tend to remain in their own silo because of the complexity of deploying and operating these environments.

Modern big data use cases, however, need a whole bunch of other technologies and tools. You have Docker. You have Kubernetes. You have Spark. You have NoSQL Databases such as Cassandra and MongoDB. And when you get into machine learning you have several options.

Deploying Hadoop, which is quite complex, is one thing, arguably made relatively easy by companies like Cloudera and Hortonworks, but then if you need to deploy Cassandra or MongoDB, you have to put in effort to write scripts to deploy them. And depending on the target platform (bare metal, VMware, Microsoft), you will need to maintain and run multiple scripts. You then have to figure out how to network the Hadoop cluster with the Cassandra cluster and of course, inevitably, deal with DNS services, load balancers, firewalls, etc. Add other Big Data tools to be deployed, managed, and integrated, and you will begin to appreciate the challenge.

IT teams should address this challenge with a unifying platform that can not only deploy multiple Big Data tools and platforms from a curated "application and big data catalog," but also provide a way to virtualize all the underlying infrastructure resources along with an infrastructure-as-code framework via open API access This greatly simplifies the IT burden when it comes to provisioning the underlying infrastructure resources, and end users can simply deploy the tools they want and need with a single click and have the ability to use APIs to automate their deployment, provisioning, and configuration challenges.

PAIN POINT 5 – ONE BIG DATA CLUSTER DOESN'T ADDRESS ALL NEEDS

Organizations have diverse Big Data teams, production and R&D portfolios, and sometimes conflicting requirements for performance, data locality, cost, or specialized hardware resources. One single, standardized data cluster is not going to meet all of those needs. Companies will need to deploy multiple, independent Big Data clusters with possibly different underlying CPU, memory, and storage footprints. One cluster could be dedicated and fine-tuned for a Hadoop deployment with high local storage IOPS requirements, another may be running Spark jobs with more CPU and memory-bound configurations, and others like machine learning will need GPU infrastructure. Deploying and managing the complexity of such multiple diverse clusters will place a high operational overhead on the IT team, reducing their ability to respond quickly to Big Data user requests, and making it difficult to manage costs and maintain operational efficiency.

To address this pain point, the IT team should again have a unified orchestration/management platform and be able to set up logical business units that can be assigned to different Big Data teams. This way, each team gets full self-service capability within quota limits imposed by the IT staff, and each team can automatically deploy its own Big Data tools with a few clicks, independently of other teams.

PAIN POINT 6: SKYROCKETING IT OPERATIONS COSTS

Developing, deploying, and operating large-scale enterprise big data clusters can get complex, especially if it involves multiple sites, multiple teams, and diverse infrastructure, as we have seen. The operational overhead of these systems can be expensive and manually time-consuming. For example, IT operations teams still need to set up firewalls, load balancers, DNS services, and VPN services, to name a few. They still need to manage infrastructure operations such as physical host maintenance, disk additions/removals/replacements, and physical host additions/removals/replacements. They still need to do capacity planning, and they still need to monitor utilization, allocation, and performance of compute, storage, and networking.

IT teams should look for a solution that addresses this operational overhead through automation and the use of modern SaaS-based management portals that help the teams optimize sizing, perform predictive capacity planning, and implement seamless failure management.

PAIN POINT 7 – CONSISTENT POLICY-DRIVEN SECURITY AND CUSTOMIZATION REQUIREMENTS

Enterprises have policies around using their specifically hardened and approved gold images of operating systems. The operating systems often need to have security configurations, databases, and other management tools installed before they can be used. Running these on public cloud may not be allowed, or they may run very slowly.

The solution is to enable an on-premises data center image store where enterprises can create customized gold images. Using fine-grained RBAC, the IT team can share these images selectively with various development teams around the world based on the local security, regulatory, and performance requirements. The local Kubernetes deployments are then carried out using these gold images to provide the underlying infrastructure to run containers.

PAIN POINT 8 – DR STRATEGY FOR EDGE COMPUTING AND BIG DATA CLUSTERS

Any critical application and the data associated with it needs to be protected from natural disasters regardless of whether or not these apps are based on containers. None of the existing solutions provides an out-of-the-box disaster recovery feature for critical edge computing clusters or Big Data analytics applications. Customers are left to cobble together their own DR strategy.

As part of a platform's multi-site capabilities, IT teams should be able to perform remote data replication and disaster recovery between remote geographically-separated sites. This protects persistent data and databases used by these clusters.

Infrastructure management for Big Data projects can be extremely complex, but with centralized management of virtualized or cloud-based resources, it can be far easier.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

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Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...