Oracle recently shipped its Big Data Appliance in January, according to a ComputerWorld.com report. This appliance together with the NoSQL database was unveiled last fall at the OpenWorld user conference. The company declared that this new appliance will run Cloudera’s Apache Hadoop implementation and management software. This announcement was made on the day of the shipment of the appliance. This shipping would possibly challenge its competitors like SAP, Hewlett-Packard and IBM and push them to also introduce Hadoop offerings that combines software, hardware and other tools.
Opinions From the Industry
An analyst from Ventana Research, David Menninger stated that this offering will make IT managers look more at bundled systems that could fulfill all the data needs of corporates. He said that the spontaneous decision of Oracle to incorporate Cloudera could be an advantage to corporate clients and professionals who are associated with this appliance. These clients include those that conduct Oracle Middleware training courses. He added that initially Oracle was supposed to run an Oracle distribution of Hadoop. But if Oracle had done this, its rivals would have probably exploited it as a weakness.
Another analyst who works with Forrester Research, James Kobielus said if IT managers do adopt this bundled Hadoop system, the other tech vendors, many of whom have already spent money on big data research will be pressed to follow. He holds the opinion that these systems give customers a wider choice. Kobielus observed that most of the enterprise Hadoop deployments have been custom built by IT engineers from the company. The companies had to purchase the hardware, license the software and then integrate it by themselves. He also said that the increasing popularity of the framework of open-source Apache Hadoop should eventually help increase the number of big data packages that are available to IT managers. This will also coincide with the increasing number of Oracle Fusion training courses available.
The Big Data Appliance
The components of this data appliance are 18 Linux-based x86 Sun servers, which have 216 processor cores, Sun server hardware, 648 tetra bite of raw disk storage with an Oracle NoSQL database, 864GB of working memory, a copy of Oracle’s Java HotSpot Virtual Machine. It also includes an open-source distribution of R statistical software. This system has been designed in order to analyze and manage sets of data. Some of these sets include click-stream data, log data that are too large or unsuitable for database storage and telemetry data.
This data appliance gives 40Gbps of InfiniBand connectivity amongst the nodes. This feature is not commonly seen in Hadoop as most of them employ Ethernet to link the nodes. A cluster configuration of numerous racks can be secured together as well. Oracle’s vice president of data warehousing product management stated that the company began shipping Big Data Connector drivers that are used for exchanging data between the Big Data Appliance and many other products of Oracle. These other products include Exdata data warehousing appliances, the Exalytics business intelligence appliance, Oracle Database 11g and its online transaction processing appliance.
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