News

Big Data Product Watch 3/4/13: Helping Hands for Hadoop

• By David Ramel
• March 4, 2013

Even hardware giants are jumping on the Big Data bandwagon, with Intel and EMC this week announcing their own Hadoop distributions among a flurry of other related product announcements from players such as Microsoft, Hortonworks and SpringSource.

The Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop includes optimizations for Intel's Xeon processor, such as chip-based support for Intel AES New Instructions encryption. By moving into Big Data software with the contribution of its Hadoop distribution to the open source community, the hardware powerhouse is joining the likes of more traditional open source players such as Linux vendor Red Hat, which contributed its own Hadoop plug-in last week.

Intel said it's "committed to strengthening the Apache Hadoop framework by contributing platform enhancements into open source in collaboration with the developer community."

Besides the integrated encryption, other platform enhancements affect the Hadoop Distributed File System, YARN Distributed Processing Framework, Hive 0.9.0 SQL queries and the HBase 0.04.1 columnar data store.

Meanwhile, EMC's Greenplum division introduced its own Apache Hadoop distribution, called Pivotal HD, which features "HAWQ" technology promising huge performance improvements in database queries and workload processing. HAWQ is described as a relational database running on top of the Hadoop Distributed File System.

EMC said that Pivotal HD "represents the world’s first true SQL processing for Hadoop, expanding the platform’s reach to SQL programmers and developers, as well as enabling compatibility with traditional BI tools."

Also this week came an announcement about a joint Hadoop initiative from Microsoft and Hortonworks. "Hortonworks has partnered with Microsoft to provide the first Hadoop implementation geared specifically toward Windows Server," reported Visual Studio Magazine editor in chief Keith Ward. The implementation, called Hortonworks Data Platform 1.2, reportedly works with Microsoft's Azure HDInsight service and its HDInsight server.

"For Microsoft-focused developers, it should make creating Big Data apps easier," Ward wrote in his blog.

Not to be outdone, the Java commmunity also got in on the Hadoop action. SpringSource "announced the general availability release of Spring for Apache Hadoop, which integrates the Hadoop framework for data-intensive distributed computing with the Spring Java/J2EE application development framework," reported John K. Waters on this site.

All these announcements occurred during the same week that the Strata 2013 Big Data conference was held in Santa Clara, Calif., making for a busy Big Data week all around.