General Electric Company (GE) has created a pioneering industrial-scale data lake software system that could change the way in which large industrial entities store, manage and gather insight from the analysis of Big Data.
The conglomerate’s new service, intended to provide airlines, railroads, hospitals and utilities superior access to Big Data, was created in collaboration with Pivotal, a platform-as-service (PaaS) provider.
GE’s Data Lake Software
The data lake software is an outcome of the joint initiative between General Electric and Pivotal to create a new data architecture that will cater to the distinctive needs of industrial data and critical infrastructure operations.
The industrial data lake integrates the conglomerate’s Predix industrial software platform with Pivotal’s software. The system enables real-time Big Data collection generated by systems such as aircraft, and runs analytics on this data to generate meaningful insight.
But instead of simply classifying and categorizing data, the system captures the metadata, which is data about the data. This translates into a more robust and diverse data framework when compared with conventional data storage.
The industrial data lakes would empower companies to forecast future problems and thus, conduct operations more competently, sustainably and profitably.
Necessity of Data Lake
The process of transforming all information into a decipherable format to derive any meaning from it has become a hindrance in managing industrial Big Data. Conventional data warehousing is often too slow, expensive and rigid with huge amounts of time spent in data collection and preparation for analysis.
Moreover, Big Data’s rapid pace of growth makes current tools unable to take full benefit of it. This unique industrial data approach unites information technology (IT) with operational technology (OT) to extract the maximum value for customers out of mission-critical information.
Applications
The data lake architecture has applications in industries like airlines, railroads, hospitals and utilities, and is also relevant to hardware ranging from jet engines and locomotives to medical scanners.
Around 25 airlines are already streaming data into the data lake software to improve management and maintenance of their fleets. The system can analyze data 2,000 times faster than earlier methods and also cuts costs tenfold. For customers like AirAsia, this represents savings of over 1% on their annual fuel bill.
Demand Scenario
In a 2013 pilot, GE Aviation used the data lake approach to amass information on 15,000 flights from 25 airlines at about 14 gigabytes of metrics per flight. It generated measurable cost savings of 10x and drastically reduced analysis time from months to days.
General Electric anticipates that the data collection will rise to 10 million flights and 1,500 terabytes of full flight operational data by 2015.
The new industrial data lake architecture meets the need for fast and highly scalable management of the industrial big data. Aided by this software, global enterprises will transform their operations by gleaning actionable insight from petabytes of industrial-strength information.
General Electric currently has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Other better-ranked companies in the diversified operations industry include Federal Signal Corp. (FSS), Macquarie Infrastructure Company LLC (MIC) and ITT Corporation (ITT), each having a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).
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