GE has announced the creation of the first-ever industrial data lake approach designed to help global industrial heavyweights to better access, analyse, and store large quantities of industrial-strength Big-Data.
The new service – developed in collaboration with platform-as-service provider Pivotal – builds on the strategic partnership between the two companies to jointly develop a new data architecture that meets the unique requirements of industrial data and critical infrastructure operations.
According to the press release by GE, the approach has a 2,000x performance improvement on analysis time, which will allow global industrial customers like railroads, airlines, hospitals and utilities to reduce costs when managing intensive processes and focus more on turning the data into actionable insight for increased productivity of assets and operations.
“Big Data is growing so fast that it is outpacing the ability of current tools to take full advantage of it. Working with Pivotal, we have created a unique industrial data approach that merges information technology (IT) with operational technology (OT) to better match the productivity and efficiency needs of our customers so they get the most value out of their mission-critical information,” said Bill Ruh, Vice President, GE Software.
“Big and fast data is a critical piece of how modern industry is reinventing itself in order to innovate and compete. The new industrial data lake architecture answers the call for the fast and highly scalable management of the unique industrial big data that is helping global enterprises transform their operations and build a new class of applications,” said Paul Maritz, CEO of Pivotal.
Built on software provided by Pivotal, the industrial data lake will integrate with PredixTM, GE’s software platform for the Industrial Internet, which provides a standard and secure way to connect machines, analytics, data and people and is built for the unique scale of industrial data.
“Big and fast data is a critical piece of how modern industry is reinventing itself in order to innovate and compete. The new industrial data lake architecture answers the call for the fast and highly scalable management of the unique industrial big data that is helping global enterprises transform their operations and build a new class of applications,” said Paul Maritz, CEO of Pivotal.
The Connecticut-based company says the industrial lake approach has been piloted in various industrial settings, including GE Aviation, where airplane engines are a fertile ground for Big Data collection and analysis. Using its Flight Efficiency Services, GE collects real-time data generated by the aircraft and its systems and runs advanced analytics on this data to help airlines run their operations more efficiently. GE says that in the case of AirAsia, this technology has resulted in a cost saving of over 1% of the airline’s annual fuel bill.
“Gathering and analysing data to improve our customers’ operations is no longer a futuristic concept, but a real process underway today, and growing in magnitude,” said David Joyce, President & CEO, GE Aviation.
GE is using the new lake approach to manage and analyse flight data for its customers, including many of the world’s largest airlines worldwide. In a 2013 pilot, GE Aviation collected information on 15,000 flights from 25 different airlines at about 14 gigabytes of metrics per flight, and the firm says that by using the data lake approach, it was able to produce measurable cost savings of 10x and significantly reduce analysis time from months to days.
