Appistry announces strategic alliances with Hadoop ecosystem vendors Concurrent, Datameer and Kitenga. The company encourages developers to choose Appistry CloudIQ Storage as a robust file system for their enterprise-grade Hadoop deployments.
Appistry on June 29 "announced strategic alliances with leading Hadoop
ecosystem vendors Concurrent, Datameer and Kitenga," the company said in a
news release.
With the announcement, made at the Hadoop Summit on
June 29, "Without any changes to their applications, users of the
Concurrent, Datameer and Kitenga products can choose Appistry CloudIQ Storage
as a more robust file system for their enterprise-grade Hadoop deployments.
CloudIQ Storage is fully decentralized and offers higher availability and
greater reliability than HDFS [Hadoop Distributed File System], whose
'NameNode' is a single point of failure and network bottleneck," said Sam
Charrington, vice president of products for Appistry.
Moreover, "Each of the three vendors' products has been validated
against Appistry CloudIQ Storage Hadoop Edition, which offers plug-and-play
compatibility with (HDFS), and each will work with Appistry to support joint
customers using CloudIQ Storage in place of HDFS."
As Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said,
"It's all about 'Developers, Developers, Developers,' right," Charrington
said in an interview with eWEEK. "Storage issues, and the single point of
failure inherent in HDFS, are a huge pain point for Hadoop users."
He added that a key question that arose at the Hadoop Summit was, "Are
there any plans to build reliability into HDFS?" According to Charrington,
"Yahoo's answer was no, but you can try what they do internally: Rewrite
your applications to post critical data to multiple Hadoop clusters."
However, that represents a level of complexity for developers, he said.
"Our approach with CloudIQ Storage is to offer a Hadoop Adapter, which
allows users to transparently replace HDFS with CloudIQ Storage, gaining a more
reliable file system designed from the ground up to provide mission-critical
levels of reliability," Charrington said.
As the Hadoop Summit indicates, and as Appistry said, "A rich ecosystem
of vendors has emerged with tools to support enterprise adoption and use of
Apache Hadoop. These vendors each add unique value by simplifying the
development of analytical applications on Hadoop and hiding the complexity of
the underlying MapReduce framework." Yet, although "these new tools
simplify Hadoop's 'front end,' the reliability of the HDFS 'back end' and the
single point of failure in its NameNode [remain] a barrier for enterprises
seeking to deploy Hadoop for mission-critical applications," the company
said.
"Cloud computing and 'big data' are driving a convergence of
application and storage in order to meet the scalability and performance
requirements of a new generation of data-intensive applications,"
Charrington said. "Appistry's CloudIQ Platform delivers this through what
we call 'computational storage,' in which we dynamically migrate application
workloads across a cloud based on the data requirements of a particular
application-level operation."
Indeed, "Hadoop is a good example of this convergence as well, being
both an application platform and a storage platform," Charrington added.
"With our Hadoop Edition we cater to developers and users that want to
take advantage of the Hadoop application platform (i.e. MapReduce) but who also
need the high levels of reliability we offer with CloudIQ Storage. Hadoop
Edition provides an adapter that allows them to swap out HDFS for our stuff
without changing any of their tools or applications, and the partner support is
strong validation of this."
"Hadoop is an ecosystem, not a company, and Appistry CloudIQ Storage
makes that ecosystem more powerful," Kevin Haar, CEO
of Appistry, said in a statement. "By providing an enterprise-grade
storage solution for Hadoop with plug-and-play compatibility with existing
tools and applications, Appistry is helping to expand the reach of Hadoop in
the enterprise by addressing the HDFS pain points of reliability and
robustness."
According to Appistry, "Concurrent develops software to help
enterprises realize the full benefits of parallel computing clusters.
Concurrent has released the Cascading open-source project, a layer over
MapReduce that allows developers to rapidly create complex data processing and
computing applications through a straightforward Java API.
Cascading provides simpler abstractions to define applications and glue them
together, as well as interfaces to work with external systems."
"CloudIQ Storage offers an important option for customers that count on
Hadoop, and we're excited to see Cascading perform quite well on this
alternative storage platform," Chris Wensel, founder and CTO
of Concurrent, said in a statement. "Our testing showed full compatibility
with Cascading and Hadoop MapReduce, making adoption quick and easy for
users."
Appistry said, "Datameer offers ... a big data analytics solution built
on Hadoop that helps business users access, analyze and use massive amounts of
data. Founded by Hadoop veterans in 2009, the company's breakthrough product,
Datameer Analytics Solution (DAS), provides unparalleled access to data with
minimal IT resources. DAS scales to 4,000 servers and petabytes of data and is
available for all major Hadoop distributions including Apache, Cloudera, Yahoo,
IBM and Amazon."
"The powerful combination of Datameer's big data analytics and
Appistry's cloud application platform provides the Hadoop user community with
an easy-to-use solution that supports even the most rigorous mission-critical application
requirements," Ajay Anand, CEO of
Datameer, said in a statement. "Our partnership will open up more
opportunities for new and existing customers to use Hadoop to tackle their big
data challenges."
Finally, Appistry said, "Kitenga provides a multimedia content mining
solution for non-programming professionals, designed to reduce or eliminate the
complexity, risk and cost typically associated with implementing massively
scaled-out multimedia content mining solutions. Kitenga's ZettaVox application
combines ready-to-run content processing elements with a content mining/analytics
solution that distributes processing over cloud and cluster-based computing
assets by leveraging the Hadoop framework. The entire process can be monitored,
batched, and the results analyzed using visualization and analytics tools."
"Kitenga is pleased to announce support for Appistry's CloudIQ
platform. CloudIQ makes it easy to scale out and manage Hadoop instances.
Moreover, Appistry has developed a product called CloudIQ Storage Hadoop
Edition that provides a high-availability distributed file system replacement
for Hadoop's native system and eliminates the weaknesses of the standard Hadoop
file system," Mark Davis, CTO of
Kitenga, said in a statement. "The combination of CloudIQ and ZettaVox
means that organizations can create enterprise-grade content mining solutions
that are managed using a robust cloud management platform."
Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.
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