Found the following bits in a post on The Register by Timothy Prickett Morgan:

While Cloudera and MapR are charging $4,000 per node for their enterprise-class Hadoop distributions (including their proprietary extensions and tech support), Hortonworks doesn’t have any proprietary extensions and is living off of the support contracts for the HDP 1.0 stack. […] Hortonworks is not providing its full list price, but for a starter ten-node cluster, you can get a standard support contract for $12,000 per year.

Hortonworks’s pricing looks a bit aggressive, but this could be explained by the fact that Hortonworks Data Platform 1.0 was made available only this week.

For running Hadoop in the cloud, there’s also Amazon Elastic MapReduce whose pricing was always clear. And Amazon has recently announced support for MapR Hadoop distribution on Elastic MapReduce.

Original title and link: Pricing for Hadoop Support: Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

As I’m slowly recovering after a severe poisoning that I initially ignored but finally put me to bed for almost a week, I’m going to post some of the most interesting articles I’ve read while resting.

Hadoop Namenode’s single point of failure has always been mentioned as one of the weaknesses of Hadoop and also as a differentiator of other Hadoop-based commercial offerings. But now the Namenode HA branch was merged into trunk and while it will take a couple of cicles to complete the tests, this will become soon part of the Hadoop distribution.

Here’s Jitendra Pandey announcement on Hortonworks’s blog:

Significant enhancements were completed to make HOT Failover work:

• Configuration changes for HA
• Notion of active and standby states were added to the Namenode
• Client-side redirection
• Standby processing journal from Active
• Dual block reports to Active and Standby

In a follow up post to Gartner’s article Apache Hadoop 1.0 Doesn’t Clear Up Trunks and Branches Questions. Do Distributions?, the advantage of using custom distributions will slowly vanish and the open source version will be the one you’ll want to have in production.

Original title and link: Hadoop Namenode High Availability Merged to HDFS Trunk (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

My list of 8 most interesting companies for the future of Hadoop didn’t try to include anyone having a product with the Hadoop word in it. But the list from InformationWeek does. To save you 15 clicks, here’s their list:

• Amazon Elastic MapReduce
• Cloudera
• Datameer
• EMC (with EMC Greenplum Unified Analytics Platform and EMC Data Computing Appliance)
• Hadapt
• Hortonworks
• IBM (InfoSphere BigInsights)
• Informatica (for HParser)
• Karmasphere
• MapR
• Microsoft
• Oracle

Original title and link: 12 Hadoop Vendors to Watch in 2012 (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

Here’s the abstract of the patent filing submitted by MapR’s for a Map-Reduce Ready Distributed File System:

A map-reduce compatible disitrubuted file system that consists of successive component layers that each provide the basis on which the next layer is built provides transactional read-write -update semantics with file chunk replication and huge file-create rates. A primitive storage layer (storage pools) knits together raw block stores and provides a storage mechanism for containers and transaction logs. Storage pools are manipulated by individual file servers. Containers provide the fundamental basis for data replication, relocation, and transactional updates. A container location database allows containers to be found among all file servers, as well as defining precedence among replicas of containers to organize transactional updates of container contents. Volumes facilitate control of data placement, creation of snapshots and mirrors, and retention of a variety of control and policy information. Key-value stores relate keys to data for such purposes as directories, container location maps, and offset maps in compressed files.

You can get the complete PDF from here.

Original title and link: MapR’s Map-Reduce Ready Disitributed File System Patent Filing (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

Just a quick recap:

• Cloudera: Oracle, Dell, NetApp
• Hortonworks: Microsoft
• MapR: EMC (integration with Greenplum HD)

Amazon doesn’t partner with anyone for their Amazon Elastic Map Reduce. And IBM is walking alone with the software-only InfoSphere BigInsights.

Original title and link: Partnerships in the Hadoop Market (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

Filtering and augmenting a Q&A on Quora:

1. Cloudera: Hadoop distribution, Cloudera Enterprise, Services, Training
2. Hortonworks: Apache Hadoop major contributions, Services, Training
3. MapR: Hadoop distribution, Services, Training
4. HPCC Systems: massive parallel-processing computing platform
5. HStreaming: real-time data processing and analytics capabilities on top of Hadoop
6. DataStax: DataStax Enterprise, Apache Cassandra based platform accepting real-time input from online applications, while offering analytic operations, powered by Hadoop
7. Zettaset: Enterprise Data Analytics Suite built on Hadoop
8. Hadapt: analytic platform based on Apache Hadoop and relational DBMS technology

I’ve left aside names like IBM, EMC, Informatica, which are doing a lot of integration work.

Original title and link: 8 Most Interesting Companies for Hadoop’s Future (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

Just in, from LexisNexis:

HPCC Systems 4 nodes cluster sorts 100 gigabytes in 98 seconds and is 25% faster than a 20 nodes Hadoop cluster.

Results achieved in December 2011 show that an HPCC Systems four node Thor cluster took only 98 seconds to complete a Terasort with a job size of 100 gigabytes (GB) on a cluster five times smaller than Hadoop. The HPCC Systems four node cluster was comprised of one (1) Dell PowerEdge C6100 2U server with Intel® Xeon® processors E5675 series, 48GB of memory, and 6 x 146GB SAS HDD’s. The Dell C6100 houses four nodes inside the 2U enclosure. The previous leader ran the same Terasort benchmark in 130 seconds on a 20-node Hadoop cluster using equivalent node hardware. HPCC Systems is an Open Source, enterprise-proven Big Data analytics-processing platform.

Thus Armando Escalante (SVP and CTO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions and head of HPCC Systems) concludes:

These results demonstrate that HPCC Systems is a leader in Big Data processing

Now switching to a post on MapR’s blog:

Recently a world record was claimed for a Hadoop benchmark. […] We were surprised to see that this world record was for a TeraSort benchmark on a 100GB of data. TeraSort is a standard benchmark and the name is derived from “sorting a terabyte”.  Any record claims for sorting a 100GB dataset across a 20 node cluster with 10 times as much memory is comical. The test is named TeraSort not GigaSort.

Original title and link: Hadoop, HPCC, MapR and the TeraSort Benchmark (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

Announcement came out today^[1]:

Hortonworks Data Platform, powered by Apache Hadoop — As we began to interact with enterprises and ecosystem partners, the one constant was the need for a base distribution of Apache Hadoop that is 100% open source and that contains the essential components used with every Hadoop installation.  A distribution was needed to provide an easy to install, tightly integrated and well tested set of servers and tools. As we interacted with potential partners, we also heard the message loud and clear that they wanted open and secure APIs to easily integrate and extend Hadoop. We believe we have succeeded on both fronts. The Hortonworks Data Platform is such an open source distribution.  It is powered by Apache Hadoop and includes the essential Hadoop components, plus some that make it more manageable, open and extensible. Our distribution is based on Hadoop 0.20.205, the first Apache Hadoop release that supports security and HBase.  It also includes some new APIs, such as WebHDFS and those in Ambari and HCatalog, which will make it easy for our partners to integrate their products with Apache Hadoop. For those new to Ambari, it is an open source Apache project that will bring improved installation and management to Hadoop. HCatalog is a metadata management service for simplifying the sharing of data between Hadoop and other data systems. We are releasing Hortonworks Data Platform initially as a limited technology preview with plans to open it up to the public in early 2012.

The fight is on–even if for now the tone is still polite. And if we are adding to the mix MapR and LexisNexis’ HPCC, not to mention the armies of marketers and sales coming from Oracle, IBM, EMC, NetApp, etc. this actually smells like war.

Edward Ribeiro apty commented: “This reminds me of Linux distros war circa 2001”.

Original title and link: Hortonworks Data Platform: Hortonworks’ Hadoop Distribution (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)