EMC Corporation today announced EMC Isilon scale-out NAS with HDFS, combined with EMC Greenplum HD. The company is also offering services, training and certification, and customer support to provide a seamless user experience and eliminate CIOs’ need to integrate products from multiple vendors.
EMC Isilon scale-out NAS, integrated with the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) protocol, aims to provide customers with a solution for accelerating enterprise-wide deployment of Apache-based Hadoop. According to EMC, until now, early adopters of Hadoop have relied on makeshift storage infrastructures not optimized for big data exploration, inhibiting the shared data access critical to robust analysis, and preventing wide adoption of Hadoop in the enterprise. EMC Isilon with native HDFS removes the integration complexities of disparate open source components and hardware, and offers a comprehensive, enterprise-ready storage solution to protect, manage, and share data in a Hadoop environment.
“Enterprise IT managers want to take advantage of Hadoop, but they want it delivered at the same level of service that they get from the rest of their IT infrastructure,” Brian Cox, senior director of product marketing, EMC Isilon, tells 5 Minute Briefing. By combining the enterprise storage of Isilon with EMC Greenplum HD, EMC seeks to help customers reduce the complexity associated with Hadoop deployments and allow enterprises to extract value from unstructured data. Customers are attracted to what Hadoop can deliver but they “are a little bit daunted” by the prospect of integrating all the pieces, and protecting and managing this over time, says Cox. “They have been looking for ways to simplify taking this from the test environment into a production environment.”
According to EMC, Isilon integrates native HDFS as a protocol, providing Hadoop users with built-in access to enterprise data protection, storage efficiency and accelerated data movement over industry standard protocols (NFS, CIFS, FTP, HTTP). Isilon’s integration of HDFS also eliminates the single point of failure inherent with traditional open-source Apache Hadoop. This integration lets customers use the Apache-based Hadoop distribution of their choice and allows them to expand and increase their adoption of Hadoop in enterprise-wide deployments.
“We wanted to take all the enterprise value that is EMC’s Isilon big data storage and make that speak the language of Hadoop. To do so, what we have added is the access to that Hadoop data by incorporating in the Hadoop Distributed File System - HDFS - as a protocol supported by the Isilon system,” Cox explains. “So just like we support NFS, CIFS, HTTP, and FTP, and all these other protocols that allow customers their typical access as well as their applications, we now can store this data for Hadoop on Isilon storage and get at it through the HDFS protocol as well as through all these other protocols so that multiple applications can take advantage of it. And, it will get all the benefits then that the Isilon scale-out NAS storage then provides in making the data easy to manage, and protecting it and optimizing its utilization.”
In addition, notes Michael Maxey, senior director of product marketing, EMC Greenplum, EMC is also offering enterprises planning, deployment, training and certification, and customer support services to assist them in moving to Hadoop environments. “We have been investing heavily in the people side of the equation to help accelerate adoption.” While Hadoop is becoming better known and use cases are emerging to validate its use, he notes, “to really get the enterprise involved and get their hands dirty in this technology, we feel there is services component that goes with it.”
EMC Global Services Big Data Advisory Service is intended to help customers identify business opportunity and build a roadmap to apply big data technologies to their enterprises.
According to the company, EMC services professionals can configure and integrate EMC Greenplum and EMC Isilon platforms into users’ environments, helping to accelerate time to value and reduce risk. EMC Data Science and Big Data Analytics “open” training and certification also builds customers’ IT staff data analytics knowledge and skills with a particular focus on opportunities and challenges presented by big data.
More information about EMC Isilon is available.