Data Gravity

Data gravity occurs when the amount of data in a repository increases and the number of uses increases. Data gravity refers to the ability of a body of data to attract applications, services, and other data. The quality and quantity of data increases over time, attracting more applications and services to connect to the data. There is growing evidence that data-rich systems attract more data, which in turn attracts more data-dependent applications, which in turn brings in more data.

In this context, gravity can be thought of as the way software, services, and business logic are drawn to data relative to its quality (volume). The greater the volume of data, the more applications, services, and other data it attracts, and the faster it is drawn to them. 

In fact, moving data farther and more frequently can impact workload performance, so it makes sense to accumulate data and place related applications and services nearby. This is one reason why Internet of Things (IoT) applications need to be as close as possible to where the data they use is generated and stored.

Hyperconvergence is a term often used to illustrate the concept of data gravity. In a hyperconverged infrastructure, computing, networking, and virtualization resources are tightly integrated with data storage within commodity hardware boxes. The larger the amount of data, the more other data it is connected to, and the greater the analytical value of the data.

The History of Data Gravity

coined the term in 2010. He argues that when organizations collect data in one place, data "accumulates." McCrory says data gravity is moving to the cloud. As more internal and external business data moves to or is generated in the cloud, data analytics tools are increasingly cloud-based. His explanation of the term distinguishes between naturally occurring data gravity and similar changes caused by external forces such as legislation, restrictions, and manipulated pricing, which McCrory calls artificial data gravity. 

References

【1】https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/data-gravity

【2】https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Data-gravity-What-is-it-and-how-to-manage-it