Empowering Big Data in Hybrid Cloud

December 8, 2017

Usha Upadhyayula

Women in Big Data hosted “Empowering Big Data in Hybrid Cloud”, a networking event sponsored by Nutanix on November 2, 2017, featuring Wendy Pfieffer, CIO of Nutanix, Sudeesh Nair, President of Nutanix and Usha Upadhyayula, Software Engineer at Intel and Women in Big Data member. Over fifty people attended this very well received event.

The event was kicked off by Usha giving an overview of Women in Big Data, followed by Wendy sharing her amazing experience in Big Data while working at Yahoo and now at Nutanix. Wendy said that one of the challenges of Big Data is personal data security. As a CIO, she emphasized the importance of security when working with personal information and lessons she learned while working with personal information at Yahoo. She also talked about how technology is changing rapidly and how, for a successful career, we need to love to learn, not be afraid to try and fail, choose paths wisely, and follow them to completion.

Next, Sudeesh Nair talked about how businesses are moving towards enabling a better consumer experience with Big Data, while making infrastructure transparent and delivering more value. Compute has become distributed (moved to where data is being generated) and the infrastructure, which has become very complex to manage massive amounts of data, needs to be managed properly. A true web-scale architecture is important in dealing with these complexities in infrastructure to make big data consumption seamless. Nutanix is building software and services on AI-based architecture and exposing API to completely automate and simplify how the infrastructure is managed, bringing together public and private cloud.

Sudheesh presented his Big Data/Machine Learning presentation again at .NEXT, Nutanix’s end user event, November 9^th at Nice, France. You can watch his presentation at minute 53:19: of the “Day 2 Morning” video. Sudeesh was followed by Maryam Sanglaji, who took us through a demo that ran the Datameer application on a Hadoop cluster deployed on a Nutanix system. She showed Prism (Nutanix central management GUI) and how the workload affects the infrastructure (CPU, Memory, Storage utilization). Like many other enterprise applications, Nutanix software powers Big Data applications and supports these applications with their scale-out architecture. Maryam also shared her personal journey and experiences within engineering and product management organizations.

We also had a chance to hear from some of the women behind Nutanix’s big data projects. We heard from Christie Lee (Systems Engineer), Neha Agrawal (Internal Data Anaytics) and Preethi Mohan (Data Scientist)–three extraordinary women who shared their stories of how they got to Nutanix and how their careers in Big Data have flourished.

Attendees also had an opportunity to meet with the recruiters at Nutanix after the event.

Women in Big Data would like to thank Michele Taylor-Smith, who helped organize the event at Nutanix, and to send a big “Thank You” to Wendy Pfieffer, Sudeesh Nair and the panelists. Overall, it was an amazing evening with so many from the community network joining together to learn from each other.