Multiple Vendors Roll Out New Hadoop Offerings

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Multiple vendors, including Microsoft, IBM and Cloudera, have made major Hadoop-related announcements this week. And VMware’s Serengeti Project is bringing new virtualization capabilities to the open source big data platform.

IBM made its Hadoop announcement at its Information On Demand and Business Analytics Forum. Joab Jackson from IDG News Service noted, “the company announced a number of new add-ons and services designed to help organizations analyse their expanding data sets more quickly. The new releases ‘are all around helping customers progress in their big data challenges,’ said Nancy Kopp, IBM’s chief of big data strategy and marketing. ‘We want to help customers use all data types.'” Jackson added, “IBM’s in-house Hadoop distribution, called IBM InfoSphere BigInsights, has been augmented with new capabilities as well. IBM has generated new report templates, ones that can conduct sentiment analysis on data from social networks, such as Facebook or Twitter.”

Meanwhile, “Microsoft is making available to any and all interested testers on October 24 public preview test builds of the Hadoop big-data framework for Windows Server and Windows Azure,” reported ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley. “The two products — which as of today have new and official names (Windows Azure HDInsight Service and Microsoft HDInsight Server for Windows) — are the fruits of the Hortonworks-Microsoft partnership announced last fall. The previews can be obtained via Microsoft’s Big Data site.”

Writing for eWeek, Nathan Eddy noted, “Cloudera, an enterprise software company that provides Apache Hadoop-based software, support and services, announced the Oct. 24 launch of Impala, a real-time query engine for Hadoop to help companies make use of big data. The platform allows batch and real-time operations to be performed on any type of data, unstructured and structured, within one scalable system.”

And VMware’s CTO Richard McDougall announced in his blog that his company is pushing out the third major release of the open source Serengeti Project, which provides virtualization capabilities for Hadoop. The project now includes “support for Dynamic Elastic Scaling, Hive JDBC connections, data upload/download interface, the ability to configure infrastructure topologies, placement controls for Hadoop nodes on Physical, Hadoop tuning configurables, and a community contributed UI.”