News

BlueData Promises Ready-to-Go Hadoop/Spark Lab in Two Weeks

• By David Ramel
• November 2, 2015

BlueData Software Inc. claims companies can get started with Hadoop/Spark-based Big Data analytics in just two weeks with its new dev/test lab offering.

The company's Big Data Lab Accelerator solution is the latest attempt to tame the notorious complexity of Big Data analytics, in this case with a package of software and services. In the face of a Big Data skills shortage, vendors have proffered various alternatives to solve the infamous difficulty of getting started with Big Data analytics. These include simplified quickstarts and onramps, managed services, online sandboxes, and many more.

The BlueData solution will combine the company's EPIC Enterprise software with professional services to provide guidance in setting up a ready-to-go lab implementation for development, testing and quality assurance. The company is targeting organizations that want to quickly get started with Big Data by first implementing a lab environment for evaluating and experimenting with different distributions, tools and applications.

"Big Data technologies such as Hadoop and Spark are complex and require multiple components, systems and infrastructure resources," the company said in a statement last week. "It can be time consuming, costly and challenging to get these new environments deployed and operational -- even in a lab for initial evaluation or development, testing and quality assurance. Getting these technologies up and running in a lab may take several months, and onboarding new Hadoop or Spark clusters for new users requires new infrastructure with little to no reusability."

Instead of several months, BlueData says a fortnight is all that's needed to get started with a turnkey, fully functional, multi-tenant, on-premises environment with up to five physical or virtual machines that can handle up to 30 virtual nodes of a company's choice of Apache Hadoop distributions, combined with Apache Spark technology or -- as is becoming more common -- Spark on its own. The test implementations can also leverage other related BI/analytics tools, such as AtScale, Platfora, Splunk/Hunk, Tableau and more.

"Within two weeks, customers will have a lab environment to evaluate Big Data tools and spin up multiple Hadoop or Spark clusters for development, testing and quality assurance," the company said. "As part of this deployment, BlueData will also work with customers to implement initial use cases for Big Data analytics."

The new lab solution was announced about five weeks after BlueData came out with BlueData EPIC 2.0, which added Docker container functionality.

The Silicon Valley startup emerged from stealth mode last fall with it EPIC Enterprise platform, yet another offering designed to "democratize" Big Data by "streamlining and simplifying Big Data infrastructure and eliminating complexity as a barrier to adoption.

To that same end, many other industry initiatives have emerged, such as "quick start" solutions from MapR Technologies Inc., managed services from Teradata and Accenture and other simplified solutions.

In BlueData's case, the two-week program costs $20,000, not counting the travel and expenses for the consultants, but counting a one-year subscription to EPIC Enterprise software.

"We're seeing a lot of enterprises that want to get started with Big Data analytics, and the typical starting point is a lab environment for dev/test and evaluation of initial use cases," said company CEO Kumar Sreekanti. "With BlueData's EPIC software, we provide a platform to simplify and streamline the deployment of Big Data analytics and infrastructure. Now we're going one step further, with a solution to jump start these lab environments and help enterprises begin their Big Data journey."