Enterprises are adopting big data technologies to analyze and derive insight from their growing volumes of structured and unstructured data. A familiar problem is the requirement to analyze data from multiple independent storage silos concurrently. In order to consolidate the data, large enterprises typically use custom solutions or build a data lake. These approaches present additional challenges and can be costly and time consuming. Alluxio helps organizations handle their big data by providing a unified view of all of the data in your enterprise – on premise, in the cloud, or hybrid. Applications access data using a standard interface to a global virtual namespace. Alluxio also employs a memory-centric architecture to enable data access at memory speed. With the combined unification and performance benefits, Alluxio can effectively provide big data federation for organizations by acting as a virtual data lake. We just published a whitepaper that goes into more detail on this common use case, you can access it here:Structured Big Data Federation Using Alluxio.