Hadoop

“Big data” is a collection of information that is so large you can’t use normal means to process it. With six billion mobile subscriptions worldwide, more than one billion Facebook (News - Alert) users and 400 million tweets per day, the volume of digital content is expected to reach the equivalent of 18 Libraries of Congress by 2015. So, a solution called Hadoop was born. Hadoop is an open-source way of storing and processing data. It can handle all types of data from disparate systems, such as structured, unstructured, log files, pictures, audio files, communications records and e-mail.

Cloudera Hadoop is one of the providers of Hadoop-based software and services. Skytap Inc., an enterprise cloud services provider focused on large enterprises and midmarket businesses, giving them a cloud services platform where they can move their existing applications to the cloud quickly, easily and securely, unveiled its Cloudera Hadoop (CDH4) for Enterprise Hybrid Clouds preconfigured templates in the Skytap Cloud public library, offering its enterprise customers on-demand, self-service access to Cloudera’s open-source distribution of Apache Hadoop, including the Cloudera Enterprise free edition.

The new solution offers easy, fast, self-service access to Hadoop with a lot of flexibility. It allows users to create up to 10 nodes and have them up and running in less than 10 minutes. I got the chance to speak with Brett Goodwin, vice president of marketing and business development, about the release and to see the new release working in action.

With Skytap’s enterprise-ready Cloudera Hadoop templates, customers can easily create virtual Hadoop cluster environments in less than ten minutes, without the need to procure costly in-house hardware. The Skytap templates allow users to create, spin-up, suspend, save and tear down Hadoop clusters of various sizes as needed. The templates also eliminate the complexity and time required to manually download, install, configure and network together all of the required software and hardware components – providing Skytap customers with unprecedented fast and easy access to Hadoop clusters. 

“In less than 60 seconds our intelligent automation platform at Skytap is going out and securing the hardware resources. It’s automatically set up on the default network, so it’s not visible to the Internet or any other networks,” explained Goodwin during the demo. “I have instant access to any virtual machine in my Hadoop cluster through what we call our Smart Client, remote access technology.”

Once up and running, it’s easy to run, suspend, shut down or share access to clusters, for example, with developers or testers for collaboration. With the free edition of Cloudera you can scale up to 50 nodes for free -- beyond that requires a license.

“This eliminates any need for hardware, any time to install, configure or setup Hadoop and really gives the ability to create a 10-node cluster in less than 10 minutes,” said Goodwin. Users can also save templates for future use.

Hadoop templates are ideal for enterprise developers, testers, data scientists and IT professionals who are interested in quickly learning more about Hadoop, experimenting with its capabilities, and developing proof-of-concepts for big data offerings. The preconfigured, virtualized templates make this solution unique.

 
Single-node template makes scaling out Cloudera Hadoop clusters with additional compute nodes fast and easy in Skytap Cloud.

“The use case that we see our customers about is they can set up this virtual Hadoop cluster, which is great for development and testing, and they don’t want to do development and testing on their production cluster. Typically you’ll run a production Hadoop cluster on its own dedicated hardware, because it’s very performance sensitive – you want to get the maximum performance out of your Hadoop cluster – but this is ideal for development and testing and then you can move it to your production cluster.”

Another thing that is a possibility is if you have an on-premises cluster and you want to augment its capacity by adding virtual nodes in Skytap, because you are connected to Skytap via the multiVPN, this will function as one, single cluster, and can be managed either on-premises or in the cloud.

 “Hadoop has forever changed the way enterprises manage big data. Skytap is transforming the way businesses deploy and benefit from big data solutions by introducing Cloudera Hadoop templates for enterprise hybrid clouds,” said Brad Schick, vice president of engineering at Skytap, in a statement. “By utilizing Cloudera Hadoop within Skytap Cloud, businesses can drive faster time to value by eliminating the need to procure in-house hardware and avoid the complexity and expertise required to download, install and configure all of the required components. For engineers, the environment is right there in Skytap Cloud and ready to go."

Cloudera Hadoop for Enterprise Hybrid Clouds is available today for all Skytap customers and a free demo is available for those who are interested. Visit www.skytap.com to learn more.

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