First, big data shook up the database arena, ushering in a new class of ‘scale out’ technologies. That’s the model exemplified by products like Hadoop, MongoDB, and Cassandra, where data is distributed across multiple commodity servers rather than packed into one massive one.
The beauty there, of course, is the flexibility: To accommodate more petabytes, you just add another inexpensive machine or two rather than ‘scaling up’ and paying big bucks for a bigger mammoth. That’s all been great, but now there’s a new sticking point: backup and recovery.
