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Nimbula Adds Hadoop to Private Cloud

Nimbula is now offering what it claims is the first Apache Hadoop-based distribution designed to process Big Data in private clouds.

The private cloud operating system provider today said it is combining its Nimbula Director platform with MapR Technologies' M3 and M5 Hadoop distributions. The combined offering will lets organizations process and analyze large volumes of unstructured Big Data in private clouds.

Using MapR's Hadoop distros (M3 is a free edition while M5 is the subscription-based version for enterprise implementations) with Nimbula Director, a customer can set up a Hadoop cluster. The offering includes templates and test scripts.

Customers can already process Big Data using MapR-based clusters in Amazon Web Services EC2 and will be able to do the same in the recently announced Google Compute Engine.

Nimbula, a startup launched in 2010 by key architects of Amazon's EC2, offers software which runs on bare metal servers running VMware's ESXi hypervisor and creates multi-tenant pools of storage and compute that allow for self-provisioning of capacity. By adding the MapR Hadoop distribution to Nimbula Director, customers can also run automated Hadoop workloads in HA clusters. Users can provision and de-provision capacity when workload requirements dictate.

"Its all about taking unstructured data and getting meaningful results out of it in a short time," said Jay Judkowitz, Nimbula's director of product marketing. "The key thing about adding private cloud is you can add a lot more elasticity to it." The result, he explained, is rather than having a dedicated cluster assigned to a specific Hadoop job, now an individual can process data and scale as many VMs are needed for the duration of the job and then de-provision them upon completion.

Nimbula offers up to 40 cores free of charge and then offers subscriptions for larger workloads.

About the Author

Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.