Massive forces are at work in the world of global communications that are, and will continue to drive, an explosion in data.

According to John Biebelhausen, senior OEM marketing manager at Mellanox Technologies – a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end intelligent interconnect solutions - it's an exponential surge that is being created by users around the world. "But, this is not being driven by the huge growth in mobile phones. And, it's not the result of the huge increase in online users for applications such as Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram. It's also not because of the accelerating surge in the use of Internet of Things (IoT) connected devices. On their own, it is none of these things. It is the result of all of these combined. All of these trends have one singular thing in common: they all create data. And, they are creating a ton of data," highlights Biebelhausen.

The causes behind this eruption in the growth of data are not hard to find and Biebelhausen says they include:

· The advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web, which has generated exponential growth in the global user community - users with ever-expanding access to computing power and bandwidth.

· The interaction of these users with Internet applications that has resulted in unprecedented levels of data and transaction volumes.

· The shift to online advertising supported by the likes of Google, Yahoo, and others.

· The expansion of the worldwide economy has spurred massive data growth for traditional commerce (such increased airline travel, international purchases, online products, and more).

· The core social networks (such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+), by their very nature, have generated a seemingly endless new array of ways for people to communicate and interact, resulting in correspondingly large data sets and transaction volume.

· Many specialised social networks have also arisen - everything from matchmaking sites to special interest groups, and even "buy-sell" applications that have generated their own micro-economies.

· An entirely new breed of social network applications has been spawned, leveraging the inter-connection of social network users in fascinating ways, driving exponential growth in application volume, again with huge transaction volumes and data sizes (sometimes with virtually overnight success stories).

· Web- and advertising-analytics applications abound, crawling and analysing virtually every aspect of the user interaction described above, again resulting in massive data sets with intense database access needs.

· An entirely new breed of chatter trend analytics applications have emerged, analysing things like Twitter tweets, Facebook chats, and so on, requiring massive levels of data storage and access.

· Lastly, the world is fundamentally now mobile. In fact, in burgeoning economies and established countries alike, smartphones and tablets are by far the most readily available, high-growth, and commonly used communication vehicle for much of the world's population, generating a nearly incomprehensible stream of data, transactions, application interaction, and messaging volume (with no end in sight).

"Mellanox Technologies, as a leading supplier of end-to-end Ethernet and InfiniBand intelligent interconnect solutions and services for servers, storage, and hyper-converged infrastructure, is at the heart of managing this data explosion," states Biebelhausen.

Mellanox's intelligent interconnect solutions are distributed in Africa by value-added reseller Networks Unlimited and increase data centre efficiency by providing the highest throughput and lowest latency, delivering data faster to applications and unlocking system performance.

"Recently we have been able to collaborate with tech powerhouses Tencent in China and IBM Corporation to produce dramatic improvements in real-time data handling performance. Early testing with Tencent, one of the world's largest Internet service providers, has shown that a large cluster of the new IBM OpenPOWER servers using Mellanox interconnect technology was able to run a data-intensive workload three times faster than its former x86-based infrastructure," points out Biebelhausen. "Moreover, this result was achieved while reducing the total number of servers used by two-thirds. Given the significant cost benefits of using fewer servers to deliver faster performance, the company is now integrating the new servers into its hyperscale data centre for big data workloads."

These upcoming results and performance improvements will lead to a better user experience, he explains, for demanding integrated mobile platforms such as Tencent's highly successful diversified services including QQ, Weixin/WeChat for communications; Qzone for social networking; QQ Game Platform for online games; QQ.com and Tencent News for information and Tencent Video for video content.

"From clicks to likes, today's networked world is creating vast amounts of data at a significantly increasing rate. Combine that with exponentially increasing internal data and you get the data explosion commonly known as Big Data. The ability to translate this vast array of structured and unstructured input into usable business intelligence provides a key competitive advantage. Mellanox with its vast portfolio of adapters, switches, gateways and specific acceleration technologies, implements the world's fastest and most robust end-to-end networking solutions for a complete, high-performance Big Data analytics infrastructure," concludes Biebelhausen.

For more details, please contact Evalean Moomsamy, Mellanox product manager at Networks Unlimited, at evalean.moonsamy@nu.co.za