Oracle and Cloudera Partner to Release the Big Data Appliance

Giving a big boost to Apache Hadoop, Oracle has released a Hadoop Appliance powered by Cloudera’s distribution. This is a follow up to an announcement that Oracle made at OpenWorld in October 2011. This release from Oracle validates the momentum that Apache Hadoop has gained in the recent past. The Oracle Big Data Appliance bundles Cloudera’s Distribution of Hadoop (CDH), Cloudera Manager, Administration and Management Console for Hadoop. The license of CDH remains unaltered and Oracle customers get the same Apache v2 license of Cloudera. Along with this, Oracle is also releasing the open source distribution of R software and Oracle NoSQL database. Oracle has earlier announced that it is getting into the NoSQL database segment through its key-value store database. R is typically used along with the NoSQL database for predictive analysis and statistical modeling.

The Big Data Appliance consists of 18 Oracle x86 Sun servers running Oracle Linux powered by 216 processor cores, 864GB of memory and 648TB of disk storage. This Appliance is engineered to work with Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle ExaLogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, Oracle NoSQL database and Oracle 11. It’s a very interesting move as the world’s database leader partners with a fairly new company to offer a significant enterprise product to customers. In October 2011, Microsoft has announced that it is partnering with Yahoo! Hortonworks to bring Apache Hadoop to the Windows infastructure. Last week Microsoft has opened up the access to Hadoop CTP running on Windows Azure. The next version of SQL Server codenamed “Denali” will provide integration of analytical tools with Hadoop. Compared to Cloudera, Hortonworks is a young company. But the fact that two giant database vendors have chosen to build their Big Data strategy around these companies speaks volumes about the importance of Hadoop. Irrespective of the stacks chosen and the commercial implementations, the winner certainly is Apache Hadoop! - Janakiram MSV, Chief Editor, CloudStory.in