News

Hortonworks Big Data Platform Coming to IBM Storage

• By David Ramel
• February 15, 2017

The Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) will be certified to work with IBM Storage solutions, IBM announced at its PartnerWorld conference.

The HDP will soon be available to analyze Big Data residing on IBM Elastic Storage Server (ESS) -- a software-defined storage system -- and IBM Spectrum Scale, which provides scalable file and object storage capabilities for analytics and content repositories.

The partnership will offer existing IBM clients another platform choice for running Apache Hadoop-based analytics, as HDP was previously made available for use on IBM Power Systems, an alternative-architecture (non x86) line of hardware that features systems specifically designed for Big Data analytics. Now HDP will be available for implementation on x86-based servers and Power Systems.

IBM said the pact will eliminate the need for IBM clients to copy data from enterprise storage to a separate analytics platform, so they can more quickly respond to data-based queries.

Conversely, existing HDP customers will have another storage alternative, gaining the ability to use IBM Spectrum Scale to power Hadoop- and Apache Spark-based workloads.

Along with providing the first IBM Storage offering of any kind certified for the HDP, IBM claimed this partnership will result in the industry's first-ever enterprise software-defined storage solution to earn such certification.

Key benefits of HDP for IBM ESS and IBM Spectrum Scale listed by the company in a news release yesterday include:

• Better storage efficiency: Unlike Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), which creates three copies of every piece of data, IBM ESS uses erasure coding, eliminating the need for multiple copies and increasing storage efficiency.
• Hybrid storage: The certifications will extend on premises storage to the cloud and therefore realize a myriad of economic, security, accessibility and other benefits.
• High performance: As an optimized, highly parallel storage solution, ESS is capable of high-speed data throughput able to exceed the performance of distributed HDFS.

"Our clients are considering Big Data analytics as a top priority; they understand that it is imperative to get insight into their data to improve competitiveness in the market," IBM quoted customer Heena Raval, an exec at Sycomp Information and Technology Solutions, as saying. "They work with Sycomp because of our expertise in deploying high-performance solutions with IBM's Spectrum Scale to manage today's data-intensive workloads. The certification of Hortonworks HDP will certainly help us to expedite these deployments and ensure IBM Spectrum Scale is a leading technology to manage the data workloads of tomorrow."

IBM didn't say when the HDP certifications were expected to be completed.