Appliance Deployment Featured Article

Software major Oracle (News - Alert) has recently expanded its Oracle Big Data Appliance family with the availability of new products that will help customers jump-start their initial big data project deployment in a cost-effective manner.

The company has unveiled the Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 Starter Rack and Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 In-Rack Expansion. The company has also introduced its Big Data Appliance Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

The new products are designed to help Oracle meet the needs of a wider number of customers and expand its offering to handle everything from the first proof of concept to large scale enterprise deployment, according to Cetin Oezbuetuen vice president, Data Warehousing and Big Data Technologies, Oracle.

For example, the Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 Starter Rack enables customers to ramp up the time it takes to complete their Big Data projects through leveraging an optimally sized appliance. They can also cost-effectively scale their footprint as their data grows in size with ease.

The Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 Starter Rack contains six Oracle Sun servers within a full-sized rack with redundant Infiniband switches and power distribution units, as well as Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 In-Rack Expansion, featuring a pack of six additional servers to expand the above configuration to 12 nodes and then to a full rack of 18 nodes. It enables customers to scale out in six-node, 216-terabyte increments. 

Industry experts believe the new options for deploying the Oracle Big Data Appliance are ideal for the many enterprises that are just beginning to implement Hadoop and need a solution that enables them to start small and scale as their requirements grow.

By integrating Hadoop into existing enterprises, Oracle also provides powerful SQL access to HDFS data, enabling organizations to leverage their existing Oracle SQL skill sets and tools to seamlessly query and analyze data stored in Hadoop.

Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 deployment is now available through the Oracle Infrastructure-as- a-Service (IaaS) in either an on-premises or behind the firewall model, for a monthly fee. The service also eliminates upfront capital expenditure for a company’s big data needs.

Moreover, the company also provides its Big Data Appliance Configuration Utility that is used to generate installation and deployment files. After you enter values into the utility, the information is validated. The utility then automatically generates the files for the Oracle Big Data Appliance.