Is Data the New Crude Oil?

By Hilary Turner, Product Marketing Senior Advisor, Dell EMC

Let’s drill down into the metaphor.

Moor Insights & Strategy argues that an optimally tuned infrastructure is key to deriving all the rich benefits that go along with effective data management and analytics. They claim that data is the new crude oil and intelligence is the new gasoline, fuelling business wins. If we break down this metaphor, it becomes clear that servers play a pivotal role in data management and analytics.

It starts with data. Lots of it. If you’re like most companies, you’re probably drowning in data. But raw data brings little value to your organisation. It’s through processing and refining that data into intelligence where the value is created. Crude oil must be refined into gasoline to deliver value to the combustion engine. The same thing is true with data. Raw data must be refined into intelligence to achieve business outcomes and attain actionable insights.

If only this process were as simple as proceeding directly from Point A (raw data) to Point B (intelligence). There is an important middle step involving your IT infrastructure. You’re probably already aware of the power of popular data management and analytics applications such as Microsoft SQL Server and SAP HANA for making sense of the data chaos. There are many others that play a role.
However, what you may not have realised is that these applications are only as good as the hardware they run on. If apps are the industrial workers bringing order to your data, servers are the refinery juggernauts upon which the whole process relies. As Moor Insights puts it, “Without the right infrastructure, businesses will never realise the full benefits of real-time analytics.”[1]

Recent ESG research bears this out: Organisations with modern servers and infrastructure are nearly 7x more likely than organisations with aging servers to report their analytics environments are “very effective” at driving business value. Businesses with modern servers are also 5.3x more likely to report that their research and development function is market leading.[2] In the important process of refining data into actionable intelligence, servers matter.

Moor Insights outlines major infrastructure considerations you should keep top of mind:

 Processor core count and per core performance. More cores can process more data and fast performing cores crunch that data more quickly.
 Processor optimisations. These can provide noteworthy performance gains in data analysis.
 Memory bandwidth and memory capacity. How much data can be stored and how quickly it can be moved are a key factor.
 Location of data. The shorter distance data sets must travel to get to compute, the faster your intelligence can be gleaned and used as fuel for your business.

Dell EMC’s new eBook, Modern Servers are the Key to Organising the Chaos of Data and Analytics, walks you through important infrastructure concerns as you pinpoint the best way to make business gold out of crude data. The eBook focuses on the technology behind the servers that are most optimised to process these heavy-hitting workloads. We also highlight several options for your IT shop designed to meet you where you are in your journey, all keeping in mind that without the proper “refinery” in your server room, you can’t refine data into insights quickly and accurately.
To learn more about how Dell EMC servers can assist you with data management and analytics workloads, visit our server page and follow us @DellEMCServers.

[1] Moor Insights & Strategy, Leveraging Server Architectures to Win in the Datacentric Era
[2] ESG, Measuring the Value of Data and Analytics Inside Modernised IT Departments

About the Author: Dell Technologies