October 24, 2013
Intel’s Hadoop Distro Seeds New HANA Cloud Service
Cloud insurgent Virtustream has announced that it will be leveraging its cloud management software platform, xStream, to deliver its own cloud implementation of SAP HANA. The cloud service provider says it is turning to the Intel Distribution of Apache Hadoop (IDH) to power the data layer of the implementation.
This, of course, is not the first implementation of HANA in the cloud – SAP has its bases well covered in that regard – but it does demonstrate the traction that both Intel and SAP are gaining after a recent partnership.
Describing the partnership is Datanami’s own Alex Woodie in an article last month:
“The agreements that SAP has forged with Intel and Hortonworks are designed to lower the barrier of entry into Hadoop for SAP and its customer base of a quarter million organizations, which range from mid-size organizations to the largest Fortune 50 accounts. SAP is selling the Hadoop distributions from Hortonworks and Intel, and providing level 1 and 2 technical support for the Hadoop distributions. This move is aimed at preventing SAP’s customers from worrying about whether SAP, Hortonworks, or Intel is responsible for fixing stuff when it breaks. That will be increasingly important, as Hadoop begins to reach its long, hairy trunk into the heart of ERP systems like SAP Business Suite, and fundamentally alter the landscape of enterprise technology.”
Intel has certainly been gaining traction for itself as it unrolls its long Intel tentacles across the ecosystem with its own brand of Apache Hadoop, which a year ago at this time didn’t exist. While the race to be known as “the” enterprise-ready implementation of Apache Hadoop has been going since the early days of commercial Hadoop, Intel has managed to take that ball further and faster than any other vendor thanks to its legacy in computing in general. To that end, Intel has recently announced a series of new partners around its IDH offering, including SAP and Oracle, as it looks to cement its place at the top of the Hadoop pile.
In this most recent announcement made by cloud provider Virtustream, Intel is working with the company to deploy its IDH framework to enable the cloud provider to deliver a HANA-Hadoop Managed Service that it can push as a “big data in the cloud” offering.
While Virtustream doesn’t have the resources or customer base of an HP or Amazon, it’s a plucky competitor who has managed to create some buzz for itself. In an announcement yesterday, the company boasts a price-to-performance rank of over 10 percent better than the closest competitive cloud (over names such as HP, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, and others), and over 30-50 percent better than the largest IaaS cloud providers worldwide (this according to a performance/value testing by independent analyst Cloud Spectator).
“We are pleased to be collaborating with Virtustream on providing cloud based, enterprise class data management solutions with the Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop together with SAP HANA,” said Boyd Davis, vice president and general manager of the Datacenter Software Division at Intel in a statement. “Users will be able to run predictive analytics and generate real-time analytics on large data sets, including business data, social media and point of sale data, in the cloud – while ensuring the environment is secure, compliant, efficient and flexible.”
Meanwhile the Hadoop deathwatch is on as industry watchers wait for the myriad of other Apache Hadoop distributors to start dropping, knowing that there is not enough room on the playground for all of these elephants.
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