Big Data
SK Telecom, the biggest telecoms operator in Korea, opted to hold hands with a local big data service provider instead of foreign companies. The unprecedented decision is drawing the attention of many in the industry.
The company has recently looked into various products for big data analysis in the telecoms industry and decided to adopt Gruter’s platform. SK Telecom was building a big data system to deal with dozens of terabytes of data each day. Then, it came across the problem of data handling speed. Though it established a Hadoop-based system to be capable of handling large-capacity data, it failed to raise the speed to the level it desires for real-time analysis.
To cope with the situation, SK Telecom began to seek a technology that can deal with the speed problem in the Hadoop system. It examined various imported technologies, such as Cloudera’s Impala, Hortonworks’ Stinger, MapR’s Drill, and EMC’s HAWQ, but decided to bring in Gruter’s Tajo in the end.
“We opted to work together with Gruter because its technological standards are on par with those of foreign companies, but our cooperation is expected to be much smoother,” said Park Geun-tae, the SK Telecom manager who is taking part in the project. He added, “We are seeing the decision as very meaningful in that it can contribute to other future open-source projects in Korea.”
The official 1.0 version of the Tajo, which has been developed in an open-source method since June this year, is scheduled to become available early next year. Although the version is 0.7 for now, Gruter and SK Telecom are going to make the development process public.
According to SK Telecom, its data handling speed has been increased by a factor of approximately 4.5 since its adoption back in June. The company is expecting that there is more room for further speed enhancement, and the percentage will be increased to at least 500% within this year.
“It is in the terabyte level as of now, but we are aiming to boost the speed to the petabyte level down the road,” said the manager, continuing, “Our future project will be run on an open-source basis and we are expecting to obtain valuable results through the course of the project.”