Data Lake Solutions

What is a data lake?

Data lakes are next-generation data management solutions that can help your business users and data scientists meet big data challenges and drive new levels of real-time analytics. Their highly scalable environment supports extremely large data volumes, collecting petabytes of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data in its native format from a variety of sources, including those previously untapped such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices and social media. As an element in your data management strategy, data lakes complement your data warehouse and business intelligence solutions. They provide the framework for machine learning and real-time advanced analytics in a collaborative environment.

What is a data lake? (05:17)

Why IBM for data lake solutions

Enterprise-grade open source

IBM is committed to open source technologies and the security, interoperability and data access they bring to advanced analytics.

Explore open source at IBM

Partnership with Cloudera

Together, IBM and Cloudera provide a choice of integrated technologies to build, manage and use a data lake for data science at scale.

Explore the partnership

Multivendor software support

IBM offers a single point of contact, regardless of software edition. A Forrester Research study finds IBM clients can save as much as 25%.

Read the study (681 KB)

Big data with IBM and Cloudera

IBM and Cloudera work together to deliver enterprise-class data lake solutions to help you replace data silos with an agile, scalable platform that can collect, store, govern and secure raw data from across your business, making it ready for analysis. Available on premises or on cloud, Cloudera’s advanced data platform combined with IBM products, services and multivendor support positions you to unlock the value of AI.

Read about IBM and Cloudera data lake solutions (695 KB)

Request the Total Value of Ownership paper (1.7 MB)

Data lake solutions

Step 1: Build a foundation

On-premises, cloud or hybrid options

IBM® Power® Systems

Simplify with a cloud data lake deployment or use IBM compute and storage to build out an on-premises data lake.

See Power Systems

IBM Spectrum® Scale

Optimize your storage capacity while protecting and efficiently moving enterprise data in your hybrid environment.

See data storage

Step 2: Manage and govern

Accelerate results and improve accuracy

Security-rich, governed platform

Optimize your data lake solution with an industry-leading, enterprise-grade big data platform offered by IBM and Cloudera.

Explore the products

Data lake governance

Use time-tested data governance solutions that improve data quality, integration and security.

See data lake governance

Step 3: Access and analyze

Bring speed and AI to your data analysis

IBM Db2® Big SQL

Use an enterprise-grade, hybrid, ANSI-compliant SQL engine to gain massively parallel processing and advanced data queries in your data lake.

See Db2 Big SQL

IBM Big Replicate

Replicate data as it streams into your data lake so files do not need to be fully written or closed before transfer.

See Big Replicate

IBM Watson® Studio

Build and train AI and machine learning models and prepare and analyze data from your data lake, all in a flexible hybrid cloud environment.

See IBM Watson® Studio

Data lake use cases

Financial services

Improve customer targeting, make better informed underwriting decisions and provide better claims management while mitigating risk and fraud.

Read the brief (492 KB)

Healthcare

Improve direct patient care, the customer experience, and administrative, insurance and payment processing while responding quicker to emerging diseases.

Read the brief (1.3 MB)