Bad Data is a Social Disease (Part 1)
Organizational bad data is a social disease easily passed to your business partners and stakeholders With 200 completed responses in our "Poor Data Quality - Negative Business Outcomes" survey, run in conjunction with The Robert Frances Group, the IBM InfoGovernance Community, and Chaordix, it is safe to say that bad data is a social disease that can spread easily and quickly. Merriam-Webster defines a social disease as
a disease (as tuberculosis) whose incidence is directly related to social and economic factorsOK, that definition works for the bad data social disease. In this case, the social and economic factors enabling and potentiating this disease include
- Business management failing to fund and support data governance initiatives
- IT management failing to sell the value of data quality to their business colleagues,
- Business partners failing to challenge and push-back when bad data is exchanged
- Financial analysts not downgrading firms that repeatedly refile 10-Ks due to bad data
- Customers not abandoning firms that err due to bad data quality and management
Social diseases negatively affect the sufferer, their partners, and the community around them. According to our respondents: 
- 95% of those suffering supply chain issues noted reduced or lost savings that might have been attained from better supply chain integration.
- 72% reported customer data problems, and 71% of those respondents lost business because the didn't know their customer
- 71% of those suffering financial reporting problems said poor data quality cause them to reach and act upon erroneous conclusions based upon materially faulty revenues, expenses, and/or liabilities
- 66% missed the chance to accelerate receivables collection
- 49% reported operations problems from bad data, and 87% of those respondents suffered excess costs for business operations
- 27% reported strategic planning problems, with 75% of those indicating challenges with financial records, profits and losses of units, taxes paid, capital, true customer profiles, overhead allocations, marginal costs, shareholders, etc.)
What is in Part 2?
In next week's post, we'll examine some of our survey results specific to bad data and the supply chain. A successful supply chain requires sound internal data integration and equally sound data exchange and integration across chain participants.A network of willing participants exchanging data is fertile ground for spreading the social disease of business. Expect a thought experiment about wringing the bad data quality costs out of supply chain management, and see what some supply chain experts think about the dependency of effective supply chains on high quality data.The Bottom Line
Believe that bad data is a social disease and take a stand on wiping it out. The simplest first step is to make your experiences known to us by visiting the IBM InfoGovernance site and taking our "Poor Data Quality - Negative Business Outcomes" survey. When you get to the question about participating in an interview, answer "YES"and give us real examples of problems, solutions attempted, success attained, and failures sustained. Only by publicizing the magnitude and pervasiveness of this social disease will we collectively stand a chance of achieving cure and prevention. As a follow-up next step, work with us to survey your organization in a private study that parallels our public InfoGovernance study. The public study forms an excellent baseline for us to compare the specific data quality issues within your organization. You will not attain and sustain data quality until your management understands the depth and breadth of the problem and its cost to your organization's bottom line. Bad Data is a needless and costly social disease of business. Let's move forward swiftly and decisively to wipe it out! Published by permission of Stuart Selip, Principal Consulting LLCDell: The Privatization Advantage
Lead Analyst: Cal Braunstein
RFG Perspective: The privatization of Dell Inc. closes a number of chapters for the company and puts it more firmly on a different course. The Dell of yesterday was primarily a consumer company with a commercial business, both with a transactional model. The new Dell is planned to be a commercial-oriented company with an interest in the consumer space. The commercial side of Dell will attempt to be relationship driven while the consumer side will retain its transactional model. The company has some solid products, channels, market share, and financials that can carry the company through the transition. However, it will take years before the new model is firmly in place and adopted by its employees and channels and competitors will not be sitting idly by. IT executives should expect Dell to pull through this and therefore should take advantage of the Dell business model and transitional opportunities as they arise.
Shareholders of IT giant Dell approved a $24.9bn privatization takeover bid from company founder and CEO Michael Dell, Silver Lake Partners, banks and a loan from Microsoft Corp. It was a hard fought battle with many twists and turns but the ownership uncertainty is now resolved. What remains an open question is was it worth it? Will the company and Michael Dell be able to change the vendor's business model and succeed in the niche that he has carved out?
Dell's New Vision
After the buyout Michael Dell spoke to analysts about his five-point plan for the new Dell:
- Extend Dell's presence in the enterprise sector through investments in research and development as well as acquisitions. Dell's enterprise solutions market is already a $25 billion business and it grew nine percent last quarter – at a time competitors struggled. According to the CEO Dell is number one in servers in the Americas and AP, ships more terabytes of storage than any competitor, and completed 1,300 mainframe migrations to Dell servers. (Worldwide IDC says Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) is still in first place for server shipments by a hair.)
- Expand sales coverage and push more solutions through the Partner Direct channel. Dell has more than 133,000 channel partners globally, with about 4,000 certified as Preferred or Premier. Partners drive a major share of Dell's business.
- Target emerging markets. While Dell does not break out revenue numbers by geography, APJ and BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) saw minor gains over the past quarter year-over-year but China was flat and Russia sales dropped by 33 percent.
- Invest in the PC market as well as in tablets and virtual computing. The company will not manufacture phones but will sell mobile solutions in other mobility areas. Interestingly, he said Dell is a commercial seller more than in the consumer space now when it comes to end user computing. This is a big shift from the old Dell and puts them in the same camp as HP. The company appears to be structuring a full-service model for commercial enterprises.
- "Accelerate an enhanced customer experience." Michael Dell stipulates that Dell will serve its customers with a single-minded purpose and drive innovations that will help them be more productive, grow, and achieve their goals.
Strengths, Weaknesses, Challenges and Competition
With the uncertainty over, Dell can now fully focus on execution of plans that were in place prior to the initial stalled buyout attempt. Financially Dell has sufficient funds to address its business needs and operates with a strong positive cash flow. Brian Gladden, Dell's CFO, said Dell was able to generate $22 billion in cash flow over the past five years and conceded the new Dell debt load would be under $20 billion. This should give the company plenty of room to maneuver.
In the last five quarters Dell has spent $5 billion in acquisitions and since 2007 when Michael Dell returned as CEO, it has paid more than $13.7 billion on acquisitions. Gladden said Dell will aim to reduce its debt, invest in enhanced and innovative product and services development, and buy other companies. However, the acquisitions will be of a "more complimentary" type rather than some of the expensive, big-bang deals Dell has done in the past.
The challenge for Dell financially will be to grow the enterprise segments faster than the end user computing markets collapse. As can be noted in the chart below, the enterprise offerings are less than 40 percent of the revenues currently and while they are growing nicely, the end user market is losing speed at a more rapid rate in terms of dollars.
Source: Dell's 2Q FY14 Performance Review
Dell also has a strong set of enterprise products and services. The server business does well and the company has positioned itself well in the hyperscale data center solution space where it has a dominant share of custom server sales. Unfortunately, margins are not as robust in that space as other parts of the server market. Moreover, the custom server market is one that fulfills the needs of cloud service providers and Dell will have to contend with "white box" providers and lower prices and shrinking margins going forward. Networking is doing well too but storage remains a soft spot. After dropping out as an EMC Corp. channel partner and betting on its own acquired storage companies, Dell lost ground and still struggles in the non-DAS space to gain the momentum needed. The mid-range EqualLogic and higher-end Compellent solutions, while good, have stiff competition and need to up their game if Dell is to become a full-service provider.
Software is growing but the base is too small at the moment. Nonetheless, this will prove to be an important sector for Dell going forward. With major acquisitions (such as Boomi, KACE, Quest Software and SonicWALL) and the top leadership of John Swainson, who has an excellent record of growing software companies, Dell software is poised to be an integral part of the new enterprise strategy. Meanwhile, its Services Group appears to be making modest gains, although its Infrastructure, Cloud, and Security services are resonating with customers. Overall, though, this needs to change if Dell is to move upstream and build relationship sales. In that the company traditionally has been transaction oriented, moving to a relationship model will be one of its major transformational initiatives. This process could easily take up to a decade before it is fully locked in and units work well together.
Michael Dell also stated "we stand on the cusp of the next technological revolution. The forces of big data, cloud, mobile, and security are changing the way people live, businesses operate, and the world works – just as the PC did almost 30 years ago." The new strategy addresses that shift but the End User Computing unit still derives most of its revenues from desktops, thin clients, software and peripherals. About 40 percent comes from mobility offerings but Dell has been losing ground here. The company will need to shore that up in order to maintain its growth and margin objectives.
While Dell transforms itself, its competitors will not be sitting still. HP is in the midst of its own makeover, has good products and market share but still suffers from morale and other challenges caused by the upheavals over the last few years. IBM Corp. maintains its version of the full-service business model but will likely take on Dell in selected markets where it can still get decent margins. Cisco Systems Inc. has been taking market share from all the server vendors and will be an aggressive challenger over the next few years as well. Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), EMC, and NetApp Inc. along with a number of smaller players will also test Dell in the non-DAS (direct attached server) market segments. It remains to be seen if Dell can fend them off and grow its revenues and market share.
Summary
Michael Dell and the management team have major challenges ahead as they attempt to change the business model, re-orient people's mindsets, develop innovative, efficient and affordable solutions, and fend off competitors while they slowly back away from the consumer market. Dell wants to be the infrastructure provider for cloud providers and enterprises of all types – "the BASF inside" in every company. It still intends to do this by becoming the top vendor of choice for end-to-end IT solutions and services. As the company still has much work to do in creating a stronger customer relationship sales process, Dell will have to walk some fine lines while it figures out how to create the best practices for its new model. Privatization enables Dell to deal with these issues more easily without public scrutiny and sniping over margins, profits, revenues and strategies.
RFG POV: Dell will not be fading away in the foreseeable future. It may not be so evident in the consumer space but in the commercial markets privatization will allow it to push harder to remain or be one of the top three providers in each of the segments it plays in. The biggest unknown is its ability to convert to a relationship management model and provide a level of service that keeps clients wanting to spend more of their IT dollars with Dell and not the competition. IT executives should be confident that Dell will remain a reliable, long-term supplier of IT hardware, software and services. Therefore, where appropriate, IT executives should consider Dell for its short list of providers for infrastructure products and services, and increasingly for software solutions related to management of big data, cloud and mobility environments.
The Future of NAND Flash; the End of Hard Disk Drives?
Lead Analyst: Gary MacFadden
RFG POV: In the relatively short and fast-paced history of data storage, the buzz around NAND Flash has never been louder, the product innovation from manufacturers and solution providers never more electric. Thanks to mega-computing trends, including analytics, big data, cloud and mobile computing, along with software-defined storage and the consumerization of IT, the demand for faster, cheaper, more reliable, manageable, higher capacity and more compact Flash has never been greater. But how long will the party last?
In this modern era of computing, the art of dispensing predictions, uncovering trends and revealing futures is de rigueur. To quote that well-known trendsetter and fashionista, Cher, "In this business, it takes time to be really good – and by that time, you're obsolete." While meant for another industry, Cher's ruminations seem just as appropriate for the data storage space.
At a time when industry pundits and Flash solution insiders are predicting the end of mass data storage as we have known it for more than 50 years, namely the mechanical hard disk drive (HDD), storage futurists, engineers and computer scientists are paving the way for the next generation of storage beyond NAND Flash – even before Flash has had a chance to become a mature, trusted, reliable, highly available and ubiquitous enterprise class solution. Perhaps we should take a breath before we trumpet the end of the HDD era or proclaim NAND Flash as the data storage savior of the moment.
Short History of Flash
Flash has been commercially available since its invention and introduction by Toshiba in the late 1980s. NAND Flash is known for being at least an order of magnitude faster than HDDs and has no moving parts (it uses non-volatile memory or NVM) and therefore requires far less power. NAND Flash is found in billions of personal devices, from mobile phones, tablets, laptops, cameras and even thumb drives (USBs) and over the last decade it has become more powerful, compact and reliable as prices have dropped, making enterprise-class Flash deployments much more attractive.
At the same time, IOPS-hungry applications such as database queries, OLTP (online transaction processing) and analytics have pushed traditional HDDs to the limit of the technology. To maintain performance measured in IOPS or read/write speeds, enterprise IT shops have employed a number of HDD workarounds such as short stroking, thin provisioning and tiering. While HDDs can still meet the performance requirements of most enterprise-class applications, organizations pay a huge penalty in additional power consumption, data center real estate (it takes 10 or more high-performance HDDs to match the same performance of the slowest enterprise-class Flash or solid-state storage drive (SSD)) and additional administrator, storage and associated equipment costs.
Flash is becoming pervasive throughout the compute cycle. It is now found on DIMM (dual inline memory module) memory cards to help solve the in-memory data persistence problem and improve latency. There are Flash cache appliances that sit between the server and a traditional storage pool to help boost access times to data residing on HDDs as well as server-side Flash or SSDs, and all-Flash arrays that fit into the SAN (storage area network) storage fabric or can even replace smaller, sub-petabyte, HDD-based SANs altogether.
There are at least three different grades of Flash drives, starting with the top-performing, longest-lasting – and most expensive – SLC (single level cell) Flash, followed by MLC (multi-level cell), which doubles the amount of data or electrical charges per cell, and even TLC for triple. As Flash manufacturers continue to push the envelope on Flash drive capacity, the individual cells have gotten smaller; now they are below 20 nm (one nanometer is a billionth of a meter) in width, or tinier than a human virus at roughly 30-50 nm.
Each cell can only hold a finite amount of charges or writes and erasures (measured in TBW, or total bytes written) before its performance starts to degrade. This program/erase, or P/E, cycle for SSDs and Flash causes the drives to wear out because the oxide layer that stores its binary data degrades with every electrical charge. However, Flash management software that utilizes striping across drives, garbage collection and wear-leveling to distribute data evenly across the drive increases longevity.
Honey, I Shrunk the Flash!
As the cells get thinner, below 20 nm, more bit errors occur. New 3D architectures announced and discussed at FMS by a number of vendors hold the promise of replacing the traditional NAND Flash floating gate architecture. Samsung, for instance, announced the availability of its 3D V-NAND, which leverages a Charge Trap Flash (CTF) technology that replaces the traditional floating gate architecture to help prevent interference between neighboring cells and improve performance, capacity and longevity.
Samsung claims the V-NAND offers an "increase of a minimum of 2X to a maximum 10X higher reliability, but also twice the write performance over conventional 10nm-class floating gate NAND flash memory." If 3D Flash proves successful, it is possible that the cells can be shrunk to the sub-2nm size, which would be equivalent to the width of a double-helix DNA strand.
Enterprise Flash Futures and Beyond
Flash appears headed for use in every part of the server and storage fabric, from DIMM to server cache and storage cache and as a replacement for HDD across the board – perhaps even as an alternative to tape backup. The advantages of Flash are many, including higher performance, smaller data center footprint and reduced power, admin and storage management software costs.
As Flash prices continue to drop concomitant with capacity increases, reliability improvements and drive longevity – which today already exceeds the longevity of mechanical-based HDD drives for the vast number of applications – the argument for Flash, or tiers of Flash (SLC, MLC, TLC), replacing HDD is compelling. The big question for NAND Flash is not: when will all Tier 1 apps be running Flash at the server and storage layers; but rather: when will Tier 2 and even archived data be stored on all-Flash solutions?
Much of the answer resides in the growing demands for speed and data accessibility as business use cases evolve to take advantage of higher compute performance capabilities. The old adage that 90%-plus of data that is more than two weeks old rarely, if ever, gets accessed no longer applies. In the healthcare ecosystem, for example, longitudinal or historical electronic patient records now go back decades, and pharmaceutical companies are required to keep clinical trial data for 50 years or more.
Pharmacological data scientists, clinical informatics specialists, hospital administrators, health insurance actuaries and a growing number of physicians regularly plumb the depths of healthcare-related Big Data that is both newly created and perhaps 30 years or more in the making. Other industries, including banking, energy, government, legal, manufacturing, retail and telecom are all deriving value from historical data mixed with other data sources, including real-time streaming data and sentiment data.
All data may not be useful or meaningful, but that hasn't stopped business users from including all potentially valuable data in their searches and their queries. More data is apparently better, and faster is almost always preferred, especially for analytics, database and OLTP applications. Even backup windows shrink, and recovery times and other batch jobs often run much faster with Flash.
What Replaces DRAM and Flash?
Meanwhile, engineers and scientists are working hard on replacements for DRAM (dynamic random-access memory) and Flash, introducing MRAM (magneto resistive), PRAM (phase-change), SRAM (static) and RRAM – among others – to the compute lexicon. RRAM or ReRAM (resistive random-access memory) could replace DRAM and Flash, which both use electrical charges to store data. RRAM uses "resistance" to store each bit of information. According to wiseGEEK "The resistance is changed using voltage and, also being a non-volatile memory type, the data remain intact even when no energy is being applied. Each component involved in switching is located in between two electrodes and the features of the memory chip are sub-microscopic. Very small increments of power are needed to store data on RRAM."
According to Wikipedia, RRAM or ReRAM "has the potential to become the front runner among other non-volatile memories. Compared to PRAM, ReRAM operates at a faster timescale (switching time can be less than 10 ns), while compared to MRAM, it has a simpler, smaller cell structure (less than 8F² MIM stack). There is a type of vertical 1D1R (one diode, one resistive switching device) integration used for crossbar memory structure to reduce the unit cell size to 4F² (F is the feature dimension). Compared to flash memory and racetrack memory, a lower voltage is sufficient and hence it can be used in low power applications."
Then there's Atomic Storage which ostensibly is a nanotechnology that IBM scientists and others are working on today. The approach is to see if it is possible to store a bit of data on a single atom. To put that in perspective, a single grain of sand contains billions of atoms. IBM is also working on Racetrack memory which is a type of non-volatile memory that holds the promise of being able to store 100 times the capacity of current SSDs.
Flash Lives Everywhere! … for Now
Just as paper and computer tape drives continue to remain relevant and useful, HDD will remain in favor for certain applications, such as sequential processing workloads or when massive, multi-petabyte data capacity is required. And lest we forget, HDD manufacturers continue to improve the speed, density and cost equation for mechanical drives. Also, 90% of data storage manufactured today is still HDD, so it will take a while for Flash to outsell HDD and even for Flash management software to reach the level of sophistication found in traditional storage management solutions.
That said, there are Flash proponents that can't wait for the changeover to happen and don't want or need Flash to reach parity with HDD on features and functionality. One of the most talked about Keynote presentations at last August's Flash Memory Summit (FMS) was given by Facebook's Jason Taylor, Ph.D., Director of Infrastructure and Capacity Engineering and Analysis. Facebook and Dr. Taylor's point of view is: "We need WORM or Cold Flash. Make the worst Flash possible – just make it dense and cheap, long writes, low endurance and lower IOPS per TB are all ok."
Other presenters, including the CEO of Violin Memory, Don Basile, and CEO Scott Dietzen of Pure Storage, made relatively bold predictions about when Flash would take over the compute world. Basile showed a 2020 Predictions slide in his deck that stated: "All active data will be in memory." Basile anticipates "everything" (all data) will be in memory within 7 years (except for archive data on disk). Meanwhile, Dietzen is an articulate advocate for all-Flash storage solutions because "hybrids (arrays with Flash and HDD) don't disrupt performance. They run at about half the speed of all-Flash arrays on I/O-bound workloads." Dietzen also suggests that with compression and data deduplication capabilities, Flash has reached or dramatically improved on cost parity with spinning disk.
Bottom Line
NAND Flash has definitively demonstrated its value for mainstream enterprise performance-centric application workloads. When, how and if Flash replaces HDD as the dominant media in the data storage stack remains to be seen. Perhaps some new technology will leapfrog over Flash and signal its demise before it has time to really mature.
For now, HDD is not going anywhere, as it represents over $30 billion of new sales in the $50-billion-plus total storage market – not to mention the enormous investment that enterprises have in spinning storage media that will not be replaced overnight. But Flash is gaining, and users and their IOPS-intensive apps want faster, cheaper, more scalable and manageable alternatives to HDD.
RFG POV: At least for the next five to seven years, Flash and its adherents can celebrate the many benefits of Flash over HDD. IT executives should recognize that for the vast majority of performance-centric workloads, Flash is much faster, lasts longer and costs less than traditional spinning disk storage. And Flash vendors already have their sights set on Tier 2 apps, such as email, and Tier 3 archival applications. Fast, reliable and inexpensive is tough to beat and for now Flash is the future.
The Little Mainframe That Could
RFG Perspective: The just-launched IBM Corp. zEnterprise BC12 servers are very competitive mainframes that should be attractive to organizations with revenues in excess of, or expanding to, $100 million. The entry level mainframes that replace last generation's z114 series can consolidate up to 40 virtual servers per core or up to 520 in a single footprint for as low as $1.00 per day per virtual server. RFG projects that the zBC12 ecosystem could be up to 50 percent less expensive than comparable all-x86 distributed environments. IT executives running Java or Linux applications or eager to eliminate duplicative shared-nothing databases should evaluate the zBC12 ecosystem to see if the platform can best meet business and technology requirements.
Contrary to public opinion (and that of competitive hardware vendors) the mainframe is not dead, nor is it dying. In the last 12 months the zEnterprise mainframe servers have extended growth performance for the tenth straight year, according to IBM. The latest MIPS (millions of instructions per second) installed base jumped 23 percent year-over-year and revenues jumped 10 percent. There have been 210 new accounts since the zEnterprise launch as well as 195 zBX units shipped. More than 25 percent of all MIPS are IFLs, specialty engines that run Linux only, and three-fourths of the top 100 zEnterprise customers have IFLs installed. The ISV base continues to grow with more than 7,400 applications available and more than 1,000 schools in 67 countries participate in the IBM Academic Initiative for System z. This is not a dying platform but one gaining ground in an overall stagnant server market. The new zBC12 will enable the mainframe platform to grow further and expand into lower-end markets.
zBC12 Basics
The zBC12 is faster than the z114, using a 4.2GHz 64-bit processor and has twice the maximum memory of the z114 at 498 GB. The zBC12 can be leased starting at $1,965 a month, depending upon the enterprise's credit worthiness, or it can be purchased starting at $75,000. RFG has done multiple TCO studies on the zEnterprise Enterprise Class server ecosystems and estimates the zBC12 ecosystem could be 50 percent less expensive than x86 distributive environments having the equivalent computing power.
On the analytics side, the zBC12 offers the IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator that IBM says offers significantly faster performance for workloads such as Cognos and SPSS analytics. The zBC12 also attaches to Netezza and PureData for Analytics appliances for integrated, real-time operational analytics.
Cloud, Linux and Other Plays
On the cloud front, IBM is a key contributor to OpenStack, an open and scalable operating system for private and public clouds. OpenStack was initially developed by RackSpace Holdings and currently has a community of more than 190 companies supporting it including Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP), IBM, and Red Hat Inc. IBM has also added its z/VM Hypervisor and z/VM Operating System APIs for use with OpenStack. By using this framework, public cloud service providers and organizations building out their own private clouds can benefit from zEnterprise advantages such as availability, reliability, scalability, security and costs.
As stated above, Linux now accounts for more than 25 percent of all System z workloads, which can run on zEnterprise systems with IFLs or on a Linux-only system. The standalone Enterprise Linux Server (ELS) uses the z/VM virtualization hypervisor and has available more than 3,000 tested Linux applications. IBM provides a number of specially-priced zEnterprise Solution Editions, including the Cloud-Ready for Linux on System z, which turns the mainframe into an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform. Additionally, the zBC12 comes with EAL5+ security, which satisfies the high levels of protection on a commercial server.
The zBC12 is an ideal candidate for mid-market companies to act as the primary data server platform. RFG believes organizations will save up to 50 percent of their IT ecosystem costs if the mainframe handles all the data serving, since it provides a shared-everything data storage environment. Distributed computing platforms are designed for shared-nothing data storage, which means duplicate databases must be created for each application running in parallel. Thus, if there are a dozen applications using the customer database, then there are 12 copies of the customer file in use simultaneously. These must be kept in sync as best as possible. The costs for all the additional storage and administration can make the distributed solution more costly than the zBC12 for companies with revenues in excess of $100 million. IT executives can architect the systems as ELS only or with a mainframe central processor, IFLs and zBX for Microsoft Corp. Windows applications, depending on the configuration needs.
Summary
The mainframe myths have misled business and IT executives into believing mainframes are expensive and outdated, and led to higher data center costs and sub-optimization for mid-market and larger companies. With the new zEnterprise BC12 IBM has an effective server platform that can counter the myths and provide IT executives with a solution that will help companies contain costs, become more competitive, and assist with a transformation to a consumption-based usage model.
RFG POV: Each server platform is architected to execute certain types of application workloads well. The BC12 is an excellent server solution for applications requiring high availability, reliability, resiliency, scalability, and security. The mainframe handles mixed workloads well, is best of breed at data serving, and can excel in cross-platform management and performance using its IFLs and zBX processors. IT executives should consider the BC12 when evaluating platform choices for analytics, data serving, packaged enterprise applications such as CRM and ERP systems, and Web serving environments.