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)

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)

Oracle Big Data Appliance hardware specification

Klint Finley for ServicesANGLE:

18 Oracle Sun servers with a total of:

• 864 GB main memory;
• 216 CPU cores;
• 648 TB of raw disk storage;
• 40 Gb/s InfiniBand connectivity between nodes and other Oracle engineered systems; and,
• 10 Gb/s Ethernet data center connectivity.

Joab Jackson for PCWorld Business Center:

The package includes 40Gb/s InfiniBand connectivity among the nodes, a rarity among Hadoop deployments, many of which use Ethernet to connect the nodes. Lumpkin said InfiniBand would speed data transfers within the system. Multiple racks can be tethered together in a cluster configuration. There is no theoretical limit to how many racks can be clustered together, though configurations of more than eight racks would require additional switches, Lumpkin said.

Oracle Big Data Appliance software specification

• Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop
• Cloudera Manager
• Open source distribution of R
• Oracle NoSQL Database Community Edition
• Oracle Big Data Connectors
• Oracle Linux

Joab Jackson for PCWorld Business Center:

Along with the release, Oracle also released Oracle Big Data Connectors, a set of drivers for exchanging data between the Big Data Appliance and other Oracle products, such as the Oracle Database 11g, the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine.

Derrick Harris for GigaOm:

However, Oracle isn’t blind to the fact that not everyone will be gung ho about buying an appliance. Its custom-built Big Data Connectors are available as separate products for those customers wanting to connect existing Hadoop clusters to Oracle database environments or R statistical-analysis environments.

Klint Finley for ServicesANGLE:

According to Oracle’s announcement “The integrated Oracle and Cloudera architecture has been fully tested and validated by Oracle, who will also collaborate with Cloudera to provide support for Oracle Big Data Appliance.”

Oracle Big Data Appliance Services

George Lumpkin, Oracle’s vice president of data warehousing product management:

Oracle will provide first-line support for the appliance and all software (including the Hadoop distribution and Cloudera Manager) through its case-tracking support infrastructure. But when particularly tough support cases arise, Oracle will tap Cloudera’s expertise.

What’s more, Oracle will refer customers to Cloudera for Hadoop training and consulting engagements.

Oracle Big Data Appliance Positioning

George Lumpkin, Oracle’s vice president of data warehousing product management:

We are positioning this as something that runs alongside other Oracle-based systems. Big data is more than just a cluster of hardware running Hadoop. It is an overall information architecture for enabling companies to analyze data and make decisions.

Doug Hanshen for Informationweek:

Oracle highlighted the Big Data Appliance as a complement to a growing family of “engineered systems” that now includes Exadata, Exalogic, and the Exalytics In-Memory Machine.

Merv Adrian (Gartner analyst) cited by Informationweek:

But what’s more remarkable is the fact that Oracle is finally looking beyond its core database. Oracle’s TimesTen and Essbase databases, which were recently upgraded for use in the Exalytics appliance, and BerkeleyDB, which was Oracle’s development starting point for the new NoSQL database, are examples of that shift.

Oracle is suddenly beginning to act as a data-management portfolio company, not just a company with a big brother and a bunch of starving siblings.

Joab Jackson for PCWorld Business Center:

Oracle is positioning the appliance for managing and analyzing large sets of data that may be too large, or otherwise unsuitable for keeping in databases, such as telemetry data, click-stream data or other log data. “You may not want to keep the data in a database, but you do want to store it and analyze it,” Lumpkin said. The appliance is intended for those organizations that want to undertake Big Data-style analysis but may not have the in-house expertise to assemble large Hadoop or NoSQL-based systems.

Pricing

Kurt Dunn, Cloudera’s chief operating officer told InformationWeek.

Oracle has put together a very comprehensive product that is priced very well.

Brian Proffitt for ITworld:

The cost of the Big Data Appliance is what will really stand out. At $500,000, this may not seem like a bargain, but in reality it is. Typically, commoditized Hadoop systems run at about $4,000 a node. To get this much data storage capacity and power, you would need about 385 nodes… which puts the price tag at around $1.54 million—three times the price of Oracle’s Cloudera-based offering (which, I should add, excludes things like support costs and power).

Doug Hanshen for Informationweek:

The hardware and software combined will sell for $450,000, with an annual support fee for both hardware and software of 12%. That’s highly competitive, working out to less than $700 per terabyte and being in line with the low costs big data practitioners expect from deployments built on commodity hardware.

Oracle - Cloudera Parternship

I wrote earlier my take on what this partnership means to both Oracle and Cloudera.

Doug Hanshen for Informationweek:

But by releasing the product early in the year in partnership with Cloudera, which has more customers and years in the market than any other Hadoop software and services provider, Oracle has made it clear that it is wasting no time and taking no chances with unproven technology.

“Cloudera brings us a couple of very important missing pieces, including its management software and assistance for a deeper second- and third-tier level of support,” said George Lumpkin, Oracle’s vice president of product management, data warehousing.

Speculations about the future of the Oracle - Cloudera partnership

Brian Proffitt for ITworld:

Students of Linux history will well remember that’s exactly what happened when Oracle partnered with Red Hat to introduce commoditized Oracle offerings… and then Larry Ellison and crew decided to roll their own Oracle Enterprise Linux in 2006 when they decided to cut Red Hat out of the stack.

This is strong historical evidence that Oracle will do the same with Cloudera, because frankly the big data market is too big for Oracle not to want to own. Big Data Appliance customers should note this, and be very prepared that future versions may not be tied to Cloudera at all, but rather Oracle’s version of Hadoop.

A few people suggested on Twitter that this partnership is a sign of a possible Oracle’s acquisition of Cloudera. TechCrunch’s Leena Rao links to an old post by Matt Asay suggesting this acquisition.

Media coverage of Oracle Big Data Appliance

• Oracle Press Release: Oracle Selects Cloudera to Provide Apache Hadoop Distribution and Tools for Oracle Big Data Appliance
• Jean-Pierre Dijcks on Oracle blogs: Big Data Appliance and Big Data Connectors are now Generally Available
• myNoSQL: Oracle Big Data Appliance Roundup: What, Why, How
• myNoSQL: Current and Future Big Data Warehouse
• ServicesANGLE: Oracle Releases Big Data Appliance with Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop
• PCWorld Business Center: Oracle Partners With Cloudera for Hadoop Appliance
• GigaOm: Cloudera puts the Hadoop in Oracle’s Big Data Appliance
• ITWorld: Big data: Oracle, Cloudera about to make it rain
• Informationweek: Oracle Makes Big Data Appliance Move With Cloudera
• TechCrunch Oracle Taps Cloudera For Hadoop Distribution Of Big Data Appliance:

Original title and link: Oracle Big Data Appliance Released Features Cloudera Distribution of Hadoop: What You Need to Know (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

The announcement of the Oracle Big Data Appliance was out for a couple of hours and already hit all media sites. Before looking at the details of the announcement, let’s try to understand what this announcement means for the parties involved.

What does it mean for Oracle?

• Oracle enters a very busy Hadoop market associated with the best known company in the Hadoop ecosystem
• With this partnership, Oracle didn’t have to make a huge investment in software development or services
• Not having to build its own distribution of Hadoop, Oracle could focus on developing the Oracle Big Data Connectors
• Oracle will delegate everything Hadoop to Cloudera thus it won’t have to deal with a very fast evolving open source project that might see some interesting events due to the
• Oracle seems to have changed the message about Hadoop being used only for basic ETL.

What does it mean for Cloudera?

• Cloudera gets access to a pool of customers (many of them possibly very large customers)
• Cloudera will not need a big sales force to reach to these possible customers. Even if Cloudera knew about them, Oracle’s sales force will do the job
• If Oracle spells Cloudera’s name in every sales pitch, Cloudera will see a huge publicity bump that will sooner or later lead to more customers

Truth is I was expecting yet another distribution of Hadoop. And even if Oracle’s Big Data Appliance doesn’t feature the official Apache Hadoop distribution, I think that by choosing an existing distribution, Oracle did the right thing. For them and for their customers.

Original title and link: Cloudera Distribution of Hadoop Powers Oracle’s Big Data Appliance (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

In 2005, Tim O’Reilly said: “data is the next Intel Inside“. Today IDC Mario Morales (VP of semiconductor research) says data is the new currency. All’s good until you read the continuation:

And the companies that understand this are the ones already developing the analytics and infrastructure to extract that value—companies like IBM, HP, Intel, Microsoft, TI, Freescale and Oracle.

The article (nb: may require registration) continues by looking at what each of these companies are doing in the Big Data space, but focuses a large part on IBM Watson.

Going back to the question “who’s leading the Big Data way“, let’s take a quick look at the technology behind Watson. According to Jeopardy Goes to Hadoop and About Watson, Watson technology is based on Apache Hadoop, using an IBM language technology built on the Apache UIMA platform^[1] and running Linux on IBM boxes.

To me it looks like open source is leading the advances in Big Data and these large organizations are just connecting the dots (as in packaging these technologies for enterprise environments and contributing missing pieces here and there)^[2]. When did this happen before?

Original title and link: Data Is the New Currency. But Who’s Leading the Way? (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

It didn’t take long for IBM to follow Oracle’s foray into the NoSQL space by announcing that IBM DB2 and Informix will include NoSQL features.

Mark Brunelli quoting Curt Cotner, IBM VP and CTO for database servers:

So, we actually took one of these NoSQL triplestores from the open source [community and] we modified it to sit on top of DB2 so that it can use DB2’s indexing, DB2’s logging, DB2’s solution for high availability [and] and all the things you would expect.

Reports are not very clear yet, but it seems that DB2 NoSQLish features are based on IBM’s Rational Jazz tripplestore solution—an approach similar to Oracle’s NoSQL Database 11G which is based on Oracle’s BerkleyDB Java Edition.

When speculating about Oracle’s future in the NoSQL market I was writing that I expect Oracle to extend the support for NoSQLish interfaces to its core database products. And it looks like IBM is taking exactly this route:

Curt Cotner: “All of the DB2 and IBM Informix customers will have access to that and it will be part of your existing stack and you won’t have to pay extra for it. We’ll put that into our database products because we think that this is [something] that people want from their application programming experience, and it makes sense to put it natively inside of DB2.”

Looking back at these events (Oracle’s NoSQL database, Oracle Big Data appliance, IBM DB2 and Informix supporting NoSQL features), makes me think if and how are these related to the new Enterprise NoSQL trend I’ve mentioned earlier.

Original title and link: IBM DB2 to Include NoSQL Features (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)