Hadoop is the most popular elephant of the Big Data Age. Its ecosystem and habitat are of interest even to those who can hardly spell “Hadoop.” Our clients are trying to get oriented in the jungle of choices and in the rapidly changing landscape of big data technologies. At the recent Catalyst conference, we decided to “show” Hadoop distribution providers side-by-side, and have them “tell” about their views on the elephant’s whereabouts. The Catalyst panel included (left to right, if you were looking at the stage):
- Microsoft — Eron Kelly, General Manager of SQL Server and Data Platform
- Pivotal — Susheel Kaushik, Chief Architect of Pivotal Data Fabrics
- Amazon Web Services — Paul Duffy, Principal, Product Marketing
- MapR — Jack Norris, Chief Marketing Officer
- Cloudera — Amr Awadallah, Chief Technology Officer
- Hortonworks — Bob Page, VP of Products
The video of this panel is available on Gartner Events on Demand (along with plethora of fantastic video presentations from Gartner events). Under the Catalyst conference time constraints, the panelists were able to cover just a few topics. But they gracefully agreed to follow up in writing on the rest of the questions from the audience and analysts. I will start publishing their responses to the following questions via this blog space early next week — stay tuned:
- How specifically are you addressing variety, not merely volume and velocity?
- How do you address security concerns?
- How do you provide multi-tenancy on Hadoop? How do you implement multiple unrelated workloads in Hadoop?
- What are the top 3 focus areas for the Hadoop community in the next 12 months to make the framework more ready for the enterprise?
- What are the advancements in allowing data to be accessed directly from native source without requiring it to be replicated?
- What % of your customers are doing analytics in Hadoop? What types of analytics? What’s the most common? What are the trends?
- What does it take to get a CIO to sign off on a Hadoop deployment?
Knowing that each panelist is busy, I offered them additional questions that they could choose to answer if they have time.
- What are the Hadoop tuning opportunities that can improve performance and scalability without breaking user code and environments?
- How much of Hadoop 2.0 do you support, given that it is still Alpha pre Apache?
- What kind of RoI do your customers see on Hadoop investments – cost reduction or revenue enhancement?
- What factors most affect YOUR Hadoop deployments (eg SSDs; memory size.. and so on)? What are the barriers and opportunities to scale?
- What hardware enhancements are you looking for to make Hadoop run better?
At the last year’s Hadoop Summit, I took this picture of the baby elephant, and I’m happy to report — it is charging now.
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