Big data has a problem: it is being abused. One of the biggest misconceptions is that big data is about archiving everything forever, buying the biggest, cheapest storage pool, and building a giant proverbial barn of hay in order to try to find needles.

Vendor marketing has abused this. Consider marketing that advises that you use that same NAS for Exchange and big data! Big data people have different storage management problems than the normal humble enterprise storage administrators.

Your typical storage administrator may struggle to deal with detailed compliance and disaster recovery issues. A big data admin will struggle to decide if check-pointing 4PB of in memory data is worth the hassle or if it will be cheaper to recreate the data.

Big data requires we rethink how we store data, where we store data, and what we store.