News

Cisco Hedges Bets, Goes All in on Big Data

• By David Ramel
• March 5, 2015

Cisco Systems Inc. announced resale partnerships with the "big three" Apache Hadoop-based software vendors: Cloudera Inc., Hortonworks Inc. and MapR Technologies Inc.

To help customers deal with the tremendous quantities of actionable data generated from the "Internet of Everything" (IoE) -- apparently an expansion upon the Internet of Things (IoT) -- Cisco will bundle those vendors' data management offerings with its Big Data products, along with services such as marketing, sales and training.

To help with that, Cisco announced the general availability of the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) Director Express for Big Data. The UCS is the Cisco x86-based datacenter server platform comprising hardware, virtualization support, switching fabric and management software, according to Wikipedia.

Cisco said the UCS Director Express provides a one-touch tool to work with the three vendors' products.

"UCS Director Express for Big Data provides a single-touch solution that automates deployment of Hadoop and provides a single management pane across both physical infrastructure and Hadoop software," the companys said last September in announcing the product. "It is integrated with major open source distributions to ensure consistent and repeatable Hadoop UCS cluster configuration, relieving customers from manual operations."

Cisco said its Big Data partnerships will help it provide a streamlined consumption model to help organizations benefit from Big Data analytics. "As organizations realize the business value of extracting data and analytics, the increased scaling of their Hadoop cluster can be accelerated with an integrated hardware and software purchase," the company said. "This will yield faster time to results while lowering the overall cost of storing data."

In fact, the company said, combined with its new Cisco Connected Analytics for IoE offerings announced last December, the partnerships provide a full stack of bundled hardware, software and services from which customers can select the best fit for their needs.

"Achieving the business outcomes of Big Data requires an analytics-ready infrastructure that enables a broad range of joint solutions with ecosystem partners," said Cisco exec Jim McHugh. "That's why Cisco is excited to be working with Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR and reselling their Hadoop-based data management solutions to customers."