Taking a step back from the world of monitoring, virtualization and cloud can be rather humbling at times. When you think about it in very elementary terms, everything that we do on a daily basis is reduced into bits, stored somewhere, sent other places, and more importantly, it is constantly growing. Going on that point further, as Floyd pointed out, we have too much data and not enough information.
Another problem that IT Operators face with Big Data is the growing challenge of managing services in increasingly heterogeneous environments. The technologies are vast indeed -Â OpenStack, OpenFlow, Cloud.com, Puppet Labs, KVM, ESXi, etc.....however, whether you're talking about legacy software (that never seems to go away) or launching an internal cloud, data is data and there is a lot of it.
That all being said, taking this back to the higher level view, I came across this interesting infographic that gives you a real sense of what the world is doing on a daily basis to continue this rapid growth of the world of data.
Thanks to Bime for an excellent infographic!