Altiscale Introduces SQL-on-Hadoop Offering for Data Cloud

PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct. 7 — Altiscale, Inc., a leading innovator in Hadoop-as-a-Service (HaaS) solutions, today announced a comprehensive SQL-on-Hadoop offering for the Altiscale Data Cloud. The complete offering is the first to allow companies to instantly access hundreds of terabytes of Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) resources through a SQL User Interface (UI) or API without having to go through the pain of setting up Hadoop and its toolset themselves.

The new capabilities of this service are critical steps in enabling the mainstream adoption of Hadoop, as companies with extensive SQL assets considering Hadoop are delaying implementation due to the risk, time and resources associated with on-premise solutions. With today’s announcement, companies using the Altiscale Data Cloud can implement production-ready SQL-on-Hadoop within a matter of days at minimal cost, with virtually no risk.

Altiscale’s new offering combines three technologies the company has been using in production for several months:

• The Hive 0.13 + Tez SQL engine. Hive 0.13 with the Tez engine is the most scalable interactive query engine on Hadoop
• A Web-based SQL query tool, providing an easy-to-use, collaborative environment for analysts to access Hive.
• Through a partnership with Simba Technologies, Altiscale is providing the leading ODBC interface to Hadoop, allowing customers to leverage popular data visualization tools such as Tableau or Microsoft Excel on their Hadoop installation.

“Altiscale’s Hadoop-as-a-Service is simply the quickest and easiest solution for any organization that wants to leverage their existing SQL assets with the transformative power of Hadoop,” said Raymie Stata, Altiscale’s founder and CEO. “Almost any on-premise approach to SQL-on-Hadoop will require at least six months to build out. Once that’s done, the deployment will still need to be optimized for performance before any real value is realized, and that’s assuming that the company has the internal operational Hadoop expertise to do so. With our instant provisioning, Altiscale’s solution enables companies to be up and running within a few days. No other solution can deliver this time-to-value.”

Companies leveraging the Altiscale Data Cloud for SQL-on-Hadoop will realize four primary benefits:

• Time-to-Value: Altiscale’s Data Cloud delivers SQL-on-Hadoop in days versus months for an on-premise solution. That allows the data science team to be productive almost two full business quarters sooner in creating business value.
• Low Risk: As a cloud service, Altiscale lets customers “dip their toe in the water” to see if SQL-on-Hadoop is right for them, without the risk of heavy, up-front capital and operational expenses.
• Low TCO: In addition to eliminating up-front costs, Altiscale’s unique billing model means companies pay less over time and only for the Hadoop resources they use. Furthermore, Altiscale’s Hadoop Helpdesk helps customers keep their Hadoop jobs running smoothly and keeps Hadoop software up-to-date, without the need for an internal operations team.
• Superior Performance: Altiscale has built the best infrastructure for cloud-based Hadoop available in the market. Customers attain levels of performance and reliability that are far and away the greatest in the industry, unmatched even by on-premise solutions.

“We needed an analytics environment our modelers could spend hours in every day, and the tools that come with Hadoop were not enough. The suite of tools that Altiscale has assembled is exactly what our team needed to be productive,” said Satya Ramachandran, vice president, Engineering of MarketShare. “Our modelers are distributed in five geographic locations, so the collaborative features were critical to us. And when paired with its core platform, Altiscale offers us the ability to quickly grow our data sets, leverage our SQL assets, and not have to worry about maintaining internal operations support.”