This article dwells on the basic characteristic features of the Big Data technologies. It is analyzed the existing definition of the "big data" term. The article proposes and describes the elements of the generalized formal model of big data. It is analyzed the peculiarities of the application of the proposed model components. It described the fundamental differences between Big Data technology and business analytics. Big Data is supported by the distributed file system Google File System technology, Cassandra, HBase, Lustre and ZFS, by the MapReduce and Hadoop programming constructs and many other solutions. According to the experts, such as McKinsey Institute, the manufacturing, healthcare, trade, administration and control of individual movements undergo the transformations under the influence of the Big Data.