Dell and Cloudera join forces for memory intensive workloads

When Hadoop was first introduced, its selling points were scalability, ability to process all types of data in high volume, and great economics. While data processing speed was important, there were few demands for real-time performance in the world of batch processing.

As the industry and the users of Hadoop mature, so have the use cases of Hadoop. In the last couple of years, with the introduction of Cloudera Impala, Apache Solr, and Apache Spark (incubating), there is a shift from the batch processing workloads of the MapReduce jobs to real-time analytics workloads. This shift posed the requirements for a system that is high in memory capacity and optimized for real-time workloads.

Recognizing this shift to memory-intensive workloads, Cloudera, Dell and Intel announced the intent to launch Dell In-Memory Appliances for Cloudera Enterprise today at Dell User Forum.

Collaborate to optimize your data centers

Dell, Cloudera and Intel understand the complexity of building a modern day data center and have collaborated to leverage our areas of expertise to deliver a solution to optimize data centers, with a solution that no single vendor can provide. Since 2011, Cloudera, Dell and Intel have built pre-validated reference architectures for Hadoop. Our common goal is to help customers shorten their time-to-value with fast, successful deployments, and to help customers manage and integrate siloed data sources, attain a unified view of all data, and gain new business insights.

The Dell In-Memory Appliances for Cloudera Enterprise is yet another proof point of the collaboration and synergies between the three companies. As the first of a family of appliances, it includes leading Dell hardware, Cloudera’s enterprise data hub -based on Cloudera Enterprise, Intel architecture for fast processing, and ScaleMP’s Versatile SMP (vSMP) architecture to aggregate multiple x86 servers into a single virtual machine to create large memory pools for in-memory processing.

Purpose-built for real-time analytics

Recognizing the shift to real-time analytics workloads, the Dell In-Memory Appliances for Cloudera Enterprise is designed and optimized for Apache Spark and other memory-intensive workloads (e.g. Solr, Impala). This appliance enables certain applications to run exponentially faster, making it suitable for high-performance data analysis such as online product recommendation engines for retail, social network trend analysis, fraud detection, and intrusion detection.

The Dell In-Memory Appliances for Cloudera Enterprise is a platform that can help companies capitalize on high-performance data analysis by incorporating real-time data streams into their applications.

Delivering faster time-to-insight

Having an appliance is the easiest way to implement Hadoop in the data center. An appliance simplifies and speeds up Hadoop cluster deployment, enabling customers to gain critical business insights faster. Customers can now focus IT resources on fine-tuning the infrastructure to deliver business value, rather than the details of deployment of the platform.

The Dell In-Memory Appliances for Cloudera Enterprise will be available in pre-sized, pre-configured options so customers can choose and quickly deploy the version that is right for their deployment.

About the Author: Sandy Lii