There have been some notable highlights from the data analytics industry bubbling up this week, both from big, and relatively small players alike.

The first update comes from EMC, one of the many companies  attending at SIGGRAPH 2011. The reason the storage giant is at the annual graphic design conference was to demonstrate how its technology is being used in the industry by companies such as Render Rocket to manage their big data operations. The   3D cloud-based rendering service provider worked with Isilon channel partner GPL Technologies to deploy its scale-out NAS solutions.

“Rendering in film and design is becoming more and more data intensive.  By moving to Isilon, we’ve increased our storage capacity five-fold since last year and cut labor and management costs by 40 percent, “ said Tracey Farrar, vice president of business development at Render Rocket, in a release.

Many service providers are venturing into big data analytics, thanks to growing demand by companies and clients.  Enterprise search and solutions provider Endeca is one of them, announcing its integration with Hadoop.  DataStax is another example – it recently released its own Hadoop distribution, which it named Brisk.

Brisk essentially replaces the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) with Cassandra’s CassandraFS, thus solving many known issues with the data management platform. For one it eliminates NameNode, and doesn’t require you to replicate a cluster from scratch when scaling it out.  Nevertheless Brisk lacks several features Hadoop has, such as the ability to handle data joins.

A growing number of organizations are starting to harness data analytics. Our own Cherr Aira detailed how companies are analyzing Twitter data to identify consumer trends concerning their service and brand, and the medical industry is also starting to take note. Seattle Children’s Hospital is harnessing software by Tableau to visualize patient data to make medical decisions and cut costs.