insideBIGDATA Guide for Higher Education – Part 2

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This insideBIGDATA technology guide co-sponsored by Dell Technologies and AMD, “insideBIGDATA Guide for Higher Education,” discusses how higher education leaders today want to improve student and institutional success through digital transformation. Dell Technologies is uniquely positioned to help at every step of the way, leveraging a robust portfolio of solutions for data analytics, AI and HPC and coupled with a deep understanding of the missions, visions, and strategies of higher education institutions.

Simplify systems & processes

It’s important for colleges to be able to ask any question of their data. An enterprise platform that is able to ingest and draw insights from unstructured data can help institutions generate more value from it—and faster—because they don’t have to spend time cleaning up their data or formatting it appropriately before they can use it. Using centralized IT solutions from Dell Technologies can help break down data silos, reduce complexity and cost, and streamline operations.

Higher education institutions must also be able to leverage a platform that offers real-time analytics capabilities, so schools can perform timely data analysis. Colleges and universities collect mostly human generated data—often from the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA®), test scores from the application process or even manually entered grades. Higher education institutions haven’t unlocked the full potential of data when compared to other industries with systems-level data. Systems-level data can mean everything from Wi-Fi access logs and the number of clicks on a university’s mobile app to records of bad key-card swipes and the amount of time it takes different students to register for classes. Disparate systems and varied classroom structures make it much more difficult to track attendance and curriculum achievements, and ensure real-time communications, all of which are critical to the success of both students and staff.

By leveraging Dell Technologies data center-class compute at the edge, you can harness the growing volume of data and capture greater value from your campus IoT applications running at the edge. This includes video analytics and sensors for public safety, parking management, campus athletics and special events, facilities management and operations, classroom control and security systems, and more.

But as data sets continue to increase, so does the need for infrastructure that can store larger amounts of data, both structured and unstructured, while also remaining within shrinking budgets. Hadoop represents a good path for higher education institutions to tackle increasingly complex problems by unlocking the power of their data. With Hadoop, colleges and universities have access to a powerful platform providing both highly scalable and low-cost data storage tightly integrated with scalable processing. Spark is an open-source data analytics cluster computing framework built on top of Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS). Spark serves as evidence of the continuing evolution within the Hadoop community—away from being a batch processing framework tied to the two stage MapReduce paradigm to a more advanced in-memory, real-time platform. The capability to understand and act upon their data opens the door to a richer and more robust ecosystem for the students, faculty and staff.

Dell Technologies has invested to create a portfolio of Ready Solutions designed to simplify the configuration, deployment and management of Hadoop clusters. These trusted designs have been optimized, tested and tuned for a variety of key Hadoop use cases. They include the servers, storage, networking, software and services that have been proven in Dell labs and in customer deployments to meet workload requirements and customer outcomes.

The modular solution building blocks provide a customized yet validated approach for deploying new clusters and scaling or upgrading existing environments. Ready Solutions for Hadoop have been jointly engineered to optimize investments, reduce costs and deliver outstanding performance. By leveraging Dell Technologies Ready Solutions for Hadoop, higher education institutions can better
serve all their key stakeholders.

Over the next few weeks we will explore these topics:

Download the complete insideBIGDATA Guide for Higher Education courtesy of Dell Technologies and AMD. 

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