2012 To Do: Bring an Enterprise-Ready Hadoop Solution to Market. Check!

We’re rooting for Hadoop here at EMC Isilon. It’s a fantastic platform and has tremendous potential to help enterprises with big data. Today, we’re very proud to announce significant innovation as we accelerate the enterprise adoption of Hadoop:

EMC Isilon’s OneFS 6.5 now natively integrates the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) protocol, thus becoming the industry’s first scale-out NAS system with native Hadoop support!

In a nut-shell, this means that all companies with Hadoop deployments, or who are thinking of deploying Hadoop, can easily build that right onto their Isilon storage system without the usual headaches of integration, reliability and availability concerns.

As the amount of Big Data continues to grow, enterprises are struggling to store, manage, protect, and analyze both structured and unstructured data. Up to now, early adopters of Hadoop have relied on makeshift storage infrastructures that are not optimized for Big Data, and have run into integration issues caused by inconsistent and unreliable vendor support for Hadoop.

With native HDFS support, Isilon removes risks associated with Hadoop deployments – like single point of failure issue associated with traditional HDFS implementations. Isilon data storage solutions leverage built-in bullet-proof enterprise data protection functionality to ensure always-on availability Hadoop applications.

This is highly innovative – unlike other enterprise vendors that are layering Hadoop on the top of their storage stack, here at EMC Isilon we have implemented the NameNode and DataNode protocols natively. In other words, we’ve removed the nascent storage from the Hadoop stack without affecting the applications – seamlessly bringing ten years of file system maturity, enterprise data protection, and the simplicity of Scale-Out NAS!

Pretty cool, right? That’s not all!

EMC will also offer Greenplum HD with Isilon – providing the first end-to-end Hadoop solution, supported by EMC’s Global Services organization in providing services, training and certification, and customer support. It doesn’t get better-rounded than this – storage, analytics, and all kinds of support from ONE single vendor.

We’re bringing it all in one simple, scalable and effective solution that will help companies and organizations of all sizes and industries to adopt open-source data analytics. Natively integrating HDFS into a storage array is a great leap forward, and joining forces with Greenplum to bring forth enterprise-grade Hadoop is a big opportunity for us in this space and we’re confident that it’ll be a game-changer in 2012.

A customer use-case:

Hadoop environments make a lot of sense for our enterprise customers. For example, Purdue University has already deployed EMC Isilon with HDFS for researchers in its statistics department. The university didn’t have a central storage infrastructure which caused major headaches for its small IT staff that had to manage many different disparate islands of data without consistent protection or performance.

After deploying the solution, Purdue was able to implement a highly reliable and flexible storage infrastructure that protected data from loss or corruption and eliminated the need to migrate data between storage silos which immediately delivered accessibility and significantly higher performance. As a result, not only was Purdue able to reduce management costs, but it is now able to provide fast and reliable delivery of data to its statisticians so they could instead focus on science rather than technology woes.

About the Author: Nick Kirsch