There are plenty of predictions made at this time of year, and it is easy to get swept up in the frenzy. Not to be left out, here are three simple things we’ll be watching in 2012 – the rise of real time, the return of small data, and the LAMP stack offspring.

The Rise of Real Time
Technology, and our interaction with it, continues to reinforce an always-on and always-instant expectation. We want search results immediately, our status updates broadcast without wait, and more finely curated information on each mouse click. On the flip side, companies that monitor online activity can no longer wait to process the information we generate, and now rely on the ability to crunch data in real time. Recently, at the MongoSV event, Aggregate Knowledge and Kontera both outlined how they are able to achieve real time operations for their analytics and advertising platforms by combining MongoDB with Fusion’s ioMemory. We expect to see more of these pairings with other database, data warehousing, and analytics packages in 2012.

The Return of Small Data
While the world is in a full on frenzy with all things Big Data, it is important to remember that many, if not most databases are far smaller than one might realize. So while Big Data is all the rage, it is Small Data that still powers the information sector. A recent study by the Independent Oracle Users Group found that 42% reported data warehousing requirements under 5 terabytes, and 56% under 10 terabytes. Just to put that into perspective, a single HP DL 580 server with 10 ioDrives can hold 13 terabytes of data, and nearly double that amount, a whopping 24 terabytes with the new ioDrive2. In practice, amazing results can be seen from even simpler solutions. Equinox, which operates 48 fitness centers catering to 160,000 members, was able to see 10-20x faster query processing, and 4-6x faster reporting with their data warehousing by including one Fusion ioDrive of 640GB capacity, and another of 1.28 terabyte capacity. Check out the full details on how they created a fiscally-fit data warehouse here.

The LAMP Stack Offspring
While the original LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack once dominated the world of web architecture, numerous LAMP-offspring are now emerging, providing unique value to customers. These are appearing in both the form of Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service integrations.

For example, VMware is now offering a bundled version of Postgres as part of Cloud Foundry. OpenStack has its own object storage offering called Swift. In each of these, and other cases, developers have an opportunity to take advantage of pre-integrated stacks.

In the case of databases and storage solutions, we expect that those dealing with intense data demands, particularly on the performance side of the equation, will also look to integrate flash memory. This is an exciting area of growth and one where we expect to see more interesting developments in 2012.