News

Stealth Startup BlueData Emerges with Private Cloud for Big Data

• By David Ramel
• September 22, 2014

Silicon Valley startup BlueData Software Inc. emerged from stealth mode with patent-pending technology to provide Big Data analytics via self-service, on-premises private clouds.

With last week's launch of its EPIC Enterprise platform, the company is the latest seeking to "democratize" Big Data by making it accessible to companies lacking the specialized talent and resources of the Web giants commonly associated with hyperscale analytics.

"With the release of EPIC, BlueData is democratizing Big Data by streamlining and simplifying Big Data infrastructure and eliminating complexity as a barrier to adoption," the company said in a statement. "Enterprises of all sizes can now build agile, secure and cost-effective Big Data deployments that deliver value in days instead of months and at a cost savings of 50 percent to 75 percent compared with traditional approaches. By making Big Data accessible to all, enterprises can get the same value out of their on-premises Big Data as companies like Google Inc., Facebook Inc. and Yahoo Inc. at a fraction of the cost, and with far fewer resources."

BlueData cited problems with existing "rigid, complex and expensive" Big Data infrastructure that wasn't purposely built to handle Big Data workloads or meet the needs of data scientists. While some companies have the resources to work around problems with the traditional infrastructure, others have not, BlueData said, and many projects haven't moved beyond initial pilot projects.

"Ninety percent of Wikibon practitioners tell us they plan to shift workloads from traditional data warehouse platforms to Hadoop," BlueData quoted Wikibon researcher David Vellante as saying. "However, complexity remains a major adoption barrier for their organizations because they often lack sufficient budget, skills and resources to get the job done. BlueData's EPIC platform directly attacks this problem and can make Big Data a reality by delivering the ability to work with any storage, any server and any application within a private cloud infrastructure."

The move comes almost one year after the company -- co-founded by former VMware Inc. executives -- received $15 million in Series B financing.

The BlueData product is a cluster virtualization layer installed between the underlying physical systems and related Big Data distributions and applications. This, the company said, provides benefits of private clouds such as multi-tenancy, data isolation, elasticity, security and control. The new platform provides a role-based Web portal to help users provision, manage and administer their Big Data infrastructure using patent-pending technologies named DataTap, IOBoost and ElasticPlane.

DataTap eliminates the need to move and duplicate data, providing Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) abstraction to run unmodified Big Data applications. It also provides optimized connections to NFS, Swift API, Gluster and Ceph.

IOBoost increases performance via hierarchical application-aware caching and tiering, allowing single-copy data transfer from physical storage devices to VMs. The company said it provides performance comparable to bare-metal Big Data implementations.

ElasticPlane uses modern hypervisor and container technologies and a modular cloud architecture to enable the fast provisioning of self-service, multi-tenant clusters. Management of resources and service-level agreements (SLAs) occurs through a sophisticated policy engine, the company said.

The EPIC platform supports other Big Data technologies such as Hadoop 1.0, YARN, MapReduce, Hive, Pig, HBase, Impala and Spark.

Last week, on the same day of the EPIC launch, BlueData also announced it had joined the Hortonworks Technology Partner program and was awarded Hortonworks certification.

"BlueData makes Hadoop adoption much simpler and more flexible for a wide range of industries that don't have enough IT architects to keep up with the Big Data application demand," said Hortonworks exec John Kreisa in a statement. "They are empowering our customers to create Hadoop clusters in minutes so they can run their jobs immediately and take advantage of the insights from the data." BlueData has also partnered with Cloudera Inc. and Databricks, among other companies.

BlueData also announced a free, full-featured community edition, EPIC ONE, available for download. "It's a full-featured version of our software that allows you to experience the power of multi-app, multi-version instant clusters on a single physical node," said company co-founder and CEO Kumar Sreekanti in a blog post, where he explained how the company got started.