With Proficy Historian, GE tackles enterprise big data
Like two ironclads steadily pounding away at each other, GE has fired its latest salvo against IBM.
The company this morning released version 4.5 of its Proficy Historian software, which collects, aggregates and organizes the massive amount of data that exists in companies and organizations.
The point is to take all that data and make good from it -- either through better decision-making or easier governance.
The new version supports more than 15 million tags, which GE says helps the software aggregate information for access across the enterprise. Security and scalability are also features the company is touting.
So how's it work? At GE Energy's own Monitoring & Diagnostics Center in Atlanta, the company eats its own dog food, so to speak, by using Proficy to monitor and collect data from more than 1,000 gas turbines across the globe:
In [a] study conducted by the GE Global Research Center in August 2011, Proficy Historian was shown to excel against relational and unstructured databases for time series data. Typical columnar or relational databases are not well suited for handling time series process data queries at this scale and some of the newer technologies are too immature at this point for real production/operations environments, according to the study.
With data coming in from all points of a multinational corporation's operations, something's got to manage it, analyze it and archive it. GE hopes it will be Proficy.
This post originally appeared on SmartPlanet's Smart Takes blog.