Big Data Virtualisation
Ashutosh (2012) expressed that the next frontier was learning how to manage Big Data throughout its entire lifecycle and that virtualization was the secret weapon that organizations could wield to battle the Big Data management and the challenge. He emphasized that virtualization was indeed the “hero” when it came to managing Big Data. Ixia Report (2014) pointed out that data virtualisation was the easiest, fastest, and most agile data access approach for analytics. The Report stressed that serving data from across big data, enterprise and cloud sources, analytics solutions are more complete and accurate with data virtualisation. The Report further, highlighted that virtualisation was emerging as an effective way to simplify the deployment and provisioning of Hadoop, SQL and NoSQL databases. The Report gave an instance where a company’s Big Data application could be virtualised in the cloud, without a need to purchase big servers. It went on to clarify that a company could acquire processing power on demand without having to build a data centre for data analysis or they could even lease servers by the hour. The Report stressed that virtualisation raised efficiency dramatically and offered the flexibility to scale and meet changing needs. Also, the Report emphasised that only virtualisation could whittle down Big Data and reduce its sprawling bulk to manageable size. In addition, the Report explained that organisations virtualise their data sets so that multiple applications could reuse the same data footprint, plus a smaller data footprint could be stored on vendor-independent devices.
Zambia Research Education Network (ZAMREN)
According to NUANCE (2008), Mbale (2006) narrated that Zambia Research Education Network (ZAMREN) was a specialised internet service provider dedicated to supporting the needs of the research and education communities in Zambia. They also pointed out that its membership was open to Universities, Research Institutions, Colleges, Communications utility companies and various Government Departments. They further alluded that ZAMREN was an association for tertiary level research and education institutions, which collectively intend to: secure low-cost broadband connectivity to all its member institutions; share its education resources via the dedicated infrastructure; and provided Advanced ICT services to its member institutions.
