News

Big Data Product Watch 6/20/13: Big Players Weigh In

• By David Ramel
• June 20, 2013

On the verge of the 6th Annual Hadoop Summit, the Big Data space is awash with recent product announcements from vendors big and small.

Among the big-company Big Data announcements was an expanded portfolio from HP, dubbed the HAVEn anlaytics platform. Announced last week, it incorporates HP's existing software, hardware and services--including HP Autonomy, HP Vertica, HP ArcSight and HP Operations Management--with Apache Hadoop, the leading open source Big Data software framework. The first product based on the platform is HP Operations Analytics, described as a new capability of HP Business Service Management that "delivers actionable intelligence about service health with advance analytics capabilities for consolidated IT data--including machine data, logs, events, topologies, and performance statistics." HP said it includes a contextual dashboard to provide information on the most meaningul errors and log entries to more quickly fix problem issues.

Cloudera Inc. today enhanced its own take on Hadoop-powered analytic data management by updating its QuickStart Virtual Machine (VM), described as a simple, one-machine solution to help learn and experiment with the Hadoop framework. The QuickStart VM is integrated with Cloudera Search and Cloudera Impala, which facilitates real-time queries on Hadoop File System or Apache HBase data. While full-out Hadoop sometimes scales to thousands of nodes, the VM provides a free, 2GB demo download for tinkering around with Hadoop in VMware, VirtualBox or KVM implementations. Along with new search functionality, the VM features Hue 2.3, a Cloudera-developed, open source Web UI designed to simplify the use of Hadoop.

Hortonworks Inc. yesterday stayed in the news with another partnership, this one with MicroStrategy Inc., a business intelligence (BI) and mobile software vendor. Hortonworks, which contributes to the enterprise Hadoop community and provides its own implementation, will join forces with MicroStrategy to provide Hadoop integration and optimization enhancements. MicroStrategy said it has certified the Hortonworks Data Platform 1.3 with its own MicroStrategy 9.3.1 solution "to provide a solution that enables business users to quickly and easily leverage Hadoop data sources and perform advanced analytics that improve decision-making."

General Electric this week announced a cloud-based "first-of-its-kind, industrial-strength Big Data and analytics platform" targeting real-time insights into data generated by sensors on large-scale industrial machines in areas such as aviation, healthcare, energy, transportation and manufacturing. The platform uses GE's new Predictivity services and technologies, which provide Internet-connected asset and operations optimization and data analytics for industrial machines. The platform is supported by the Proficy Historian HD, developed by GE and described as "the first Hadoop-based historian data management software." GE said it provides "real-time data management, analytics, and machine-to-operations connectivity in a secure, closed-loop architecture so critical global industries can move from a reactive to a predictive industrial operating model."

Cray Inc., known for its supercomputer prowess, last week announced its own Hadoop solution, "Cray Cluster Supercomputers for Hadoop." These are optimized Cray CS300 systems with a solution consisting of a Linux OS, workload management software, Cray's own "Advanced Cluster Engine" management software and the Intel Distriution for Apache Hadoop software. Cray said the optimized hardware/software solution provides benefits such as turnkey deployment and increased performance, reliability and maintainability.