Red Hat Turns Big Data into Actionable Information with JBoss Data Virtualization

Big data holds intrinsic value for enterprises that are able to effectively extract important operational and analytical insights for their businesses; however, the volume and diversity of data types and sources can often make this a challenging and distracting endeavor. Today, we launched the beta of our data integration solution, Red Hat JBoss Data Virtualization 6 (formerly JBoss Data Services), which has been designed to provide a business-friendly representation of big data in order to help users and developers more effectively extract valuable insights from the data. These big data insights represent one of the ways businesses are driving leadership today, delivering in areas such as customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, and return on investment.

Information management and delivery is a critical function of modern business operations, and this is particularly true for organizations in the financial services, healthcare, pharmaceutical, telecommunications, retail, and government industries where information is foundational to making intelligent decisions.

JBoss Data Virtualization lets users access, query and transform data from multiple sources, including relational databases, big data, XML files, Hadoop and NoSQL files, without having to move the data. Using JBoss Data Virtualization to set up a virtual data view helps overcome the challenges of retrieving and using data that is spread far and wide within an organization and accomplishes three things:

• Simplicity: Developers and users get what they need, when they need it. With a virtual data view, they don’t face the hassle of chasing the right data source, joining the data and composing it for use in their applications. Without a consolidated enterprise view, the business is often forced to act on partial, incomplete, and inconsistent data, leading to incomplete decision making.
• Speed: Not only is the volume and diversity of data exploding, but the size and number of data sources is on the rise as well. Technology acquisition, business consolidation, and the general evolution of IT means that organizations continue to deal with silos, rapid changes in the business and network bandwidth limitations. Data latency issues can lead to delayed—or even wrong—decisions due to users not being able to get the information they need, when they need it.
• Control: Inconsistent and ambiguous data can lead to inaccurate and potentially costly decisions. Organizations are able to gain valuable control over their data and improve the quality of information and compliance by taking steps to mitigate vendor and technologies dependencies, deploying a metadata repository, and centralizing functions related to access control and auditing.

These factors make JBoss Data Virtualization a great solution for enabling things like self-service business intelligence and agile SOA development and integration. The virtual, reusable data model from JBoss Data Virtualization enables users to interact with the data without having to know the complexities of the underlying heterogeneous environment, which may include traditional relational and application-based data types, and cloud or big data-based sources. It also allows multiple BI tools to acquire data from a centralized data layer.

JBoss Data Virtualization can also shorten the creation of virtual data stores without the need to touch underlying sources, and the creation of data services that encapsulate the data access logic and allow multiple business services to acquire data from a centralized data layer.

The beta version of JBoss Data Virtualization 6 includes a number of key features and capabilities designed to help meet these needs, including:

• Big data and cloud data integration through support for Hadoop, NoSQL databases, Red Hat JBoss Data Grid and a tech preview of MongoDB as data sources;
• Business dashboard to quickly build reports and visualize data;
• Enhanced developer productivity through a graphical virtual model design tool integrated with Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio, SQL-DDL-based virtual database definitions, import/reuse functions, and support for native queries;
• Simplified deployment and packaging with Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP).

In addition to these features, the beta version of JBoss Data Virtualization 6 begins to lay the foundation for running data virtualization in the cloud, which was outlined recently as part of a roadmap for delivering key Red Hat JBoss Middleware technologies as services on OpenShift by Red Hat, Red Hat’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering. Read the full announcement here.

Discover how JBoss Data Virtualization 6 can help overcome data access and integration challenges by joining the JBoss.org community and downloading the beta at http://www.jboss.org/products/datavirt.