In my enthusiasm for all things Dell + OpenStack, I have neglected to talk about my team’s interesting Big Data work with Apache Hadoop.  Hadoop is a suite of open source projects for analyzing large data sets of unstructured data.  Initially, Hadoop centered around use of the map-reduce algorithm; however, it’s grown way beyond that as the community has worked to solve problems related to data storage, discovery, and scheduling.

Big Data clouds are well suited to my team because the model (non-redundant/cloud) and scale (hyper) of their deployments.  It should be no surprise that builders of analysis clouds have the same goals (maximizing operational ROI per compute unit) as builders of other types of clouds.

Our Hadoop solution relies on the same core principles (CloudOps) and technologies (Crowbar) as our OpenStack solution.  Like our other cloud solutions, we are working closely with a proven leader: Cloudera.  Now that we’ve formally announced our solution and partnership, I can talk a about what we’re doing on the Big Data front.

One extra thing that I’m proud to announce, we’ll be adding Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) support to Crowbar to support our Hadoop solution.  This support is not just at the node level: we are making Crowbar admin run on either platform too!  This is significant for two reasons:

1. It expands the number of platforms and support options for Crowbar users
2. It provides the framework to support more varieties of node operating environment (e.g.: XenServer, BSD, DRDOS, etc)

For more information, check out:

• Joseph George’s Blog
• Barton George’s Blog
• Aurelian “AD” Dumitru Blog