John Bantleman, CEO, and Deirdre Mahon, VP of marketing, of RainStor, introduced me to some enhancements the company was just about to announce. The goal was to make Hadoop easier to use for corporate developers, improve the performance of Hadoop and also dramatically reduce the number of systems needed to process Hadoop-based analytics.
Before we get into what RainStor had to say, let's take a moment to look at Hadoop.
The Apache foundation describes Hadoop in the following way:
The Apache™ Hadoop™ project develops open-source software for reliable, scalable, distributed computing.
The Apache Hadoop software library is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using a simple programming model. It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage. Rather than rely on hardware to deliver high-avaiability, the library itself is designed to detect and handle failures at the application layer, so delivering a highly-availabile service on top of a cluster of computers, each of which may be prone to failures.
The project includes these subprojects:
- Hadoop Common: The common utilities that support the other Hadoop subprojects.
- Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS™): A distributed file system that provides high-throughput access to application data.
- Hadoop MapReduce: A software framework for distributed processing of large data sets on compute clusters.
Other Hadoop-related projects at Apache include:
- Avro™: A data serialization system.
- Cassandra™: A scalable multi-master database with no single points of failure.
- Chukwa™: A data collection system for managing large distributed systems.
- HBase™: A scalable, distributed database that supports structured data storage for large tables.
- Hive™: A data warehouse infrastructure that provides data summarization and ad hoc querying.
- Mahout™: A Scalable machine learning and data mining library.
- Pig™: A high-level data-flow language and execution framework for parallel computation.
- ZooKeeper™: A high-performance coordination service for distributed applications.
RainStor has added the following enhancements to the Hadoop environment:
If your organization is using Hadoop or thinking about using Hadoop for business analytics, it would be worth the time to talk with RainStor.