Exalytics, an appliance for near-real-time business intelligence applications, debuted at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 Sunday night. A key part of Oracle’s big data strategy, Exalytics layers in-memory and multi-dimensional database technology atop 40 Intel Xeon cores, all running in parallel, said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Read more »
It looks like Oracle does indeed have a big data strategy in place, complete with plans for Hadoop, NoSQL and even an integration of the R statistical analysis software. Today, some of startups affected by Oracle’s impending moves weighed in with their takes on the situation. Read more »
Oracle customers have lots of questions for the database giant. If you’re one of the 50,000 people Oracle expects to converge on the Moscone Center starting Sunday–or even if you’re not–here are some key things to look out for at the big Oracle OpenWorld 2011 Conference. Read more »
Karmasphere, a Cupertino, Calif.-based startup focusing on helping analysts write better big data applications, has raised $6 million in a Series B round. That brings the announced VC investment in Hadoop to more than $30 million in the last 30 days. Read more »
It looks as if Oracle’s official forays into Hadoop and NoSQL spaces will come at next week’s OpenWorld conference. The company appears to be working on an Oracle Loader for Hadoop and a NoSQL database as part of an all-encompassing big data platform. Read more »
You might have heard of the SuperNAP data center before because of its military-grade security, more-than-400,000-square-foot footprint and roots as Enron’s attempt to build a bandwidth exchange, but the cutting-edge facility is also home to some very interesting customers. Read more »
Much like everyone has some product or strategy to optimize on “the cloud,” momentum is already gathering around the next big technology trend to drive buzzzwords — big data. VMware is no exception, so I spoke with Steve Herrod, the company’s CTO to find out more. Read more »
Hadoop is all the rage in analytics, but it still isn’t easy for mere mortals to utilize the big data framework. A handful of companies are trying to solve this problem, including Karmasphere with the latest version of its Analyst Big Data product. Read more »
Storage giant EMC is adding more muscle to its Hadoop strategy with a 1,000-node cluster for testing new Apache Hadoop releases and a new analytics appliance combining EMC’s Hadoop distribution with the EMC Greenplum Database. Read more »
DataStax has created the first commercial distribution of the Apache Cassandra database and has just closed an $11 million Series B round. Neither piece of news should come as a shock because as NoSQL products have been maturing over the past year, money has always followed. Read more »
Building on his social media success in 2008, it looks like big data will be a driving force behind President Obama’s reelection campaign. To that end, his team is taking to the streets to find data scientists and engineers, including at an event Tuesday at Stanford. Read more »
We all know about the consumer Web innovations in the last ten years, created by crunching massive amounts of consumer data for personalization. But how are companies in other industries leveraging the big data that’s erupting from social media services? Read more »
Balancing an open-source community with commercial interests can be difficult, which is why HPCC Systems sought the help of Bruce Perens before open-sourcing its eponymous big-data-processing software. Essentially, the company either ensures the existence of a free version or pulls contributed code. Read more »
Predictive analytics provider Opera Solutions has raised $84 million from equity investors in its first-ever funding round, but that amount shouldn’t be surprising for anyone familiar with the company. I’ve called Opera the big data expert you’ve never heard of, but that’s about to change. Read more »
HPCC Systems has released the open source code of its data-processing software that it’s positioning as a better version of Hadoop. The code is available on Github, and it marks the commencement of HPCC Systems’ quest to build a community of developers underneath Hadoop’s expansive shadow. Read more »
Hadoop-based startup Platfora has raised $5.7 million from Andreessen Horowitz and military intelligence–focused strategic investor In-Q-Tel. Investors are excited because Platfora promises big things around making big data analytics obtainable by anyone needing to parse large volumes of unstructured data, not just data scientists. Read more »
MapR Technologies, the San Jose, Calif.-based startup that sells it own Hadoop distribution for analyzing large volumes of unstructured data, has raised a $20 million Series B round, which will helps its positioning as a worthy alternative in a space that Cloudera has dominated since 2009. Read more »
Hopper wants to make searching for travel options a more complete experience using big data tools, and it has raised millions to do it. Hopper lets users enter keyword searches, but it provides results far beyond those typically found in a keyword search. Read more »
Dell’s Crowbar installation-and-configuration tool now works VMware’s Cloud Foundry. With servers fast becoming low-margin commodities thanks to the push toward micro servers, Dell is doing its best to make deploying the software that inspired the new generation of servers a breeze. Read more »
Greylock Partners, the VC firm backing companies such as Cloudera, Airbnb and ZipCar hired DJ Patil, formerly the chief product officer at Color, as a data scientist in residence. Greylock’s trying to help its companies monetize the rich vein of user data on the web. Read more »
Todd Papaioannou, VP and chief cloud architect at Yahoo, has left the company for a role as entrepreneur in residence at Battery Ventures. At Yahoo, he drove the strategic directions for both the cloud computing and Hadoop teams and helped define the company’s overall IT strategy. Read more »
Attention webscale aficionados, Twitter plans to open source its Hadoop-like real-time data processing tool known as Storm. The social service nabbed the code through its acquisition last month of BackType, and says it’s a better tool for processing streams of data. Read more »
The great things about open source software stacks is that they’re free and they work. The not-so-great thing is that — like many open source projects — they can be difficult to configure and manage. Luckily, hardware vendors are stepping in to fill the void. Read more »
The face of high-performance computing is changing. That means new technologies and new names, but also familiar names in new places. Anyone that doesn’t have a cloud computing story to tell, possibly a big data one too, might starting looking really old really quickly. Read more »
The open-source, data-processing tool Hadoop is already popular for a variety of use cases that can benefit from clusters of machines churning through unstructured data — such as search engines and social-media analysis — and now it’s turning its attention to security data. Read more »
Appistry, a St. Louis–based software company, has closed a $12 million Series D round for its family of distributed computing products. The company also appears to have changed its corporate messaging — from that of a cloud-computing vendor to that of a big-data vendor. Read more »
Web companies like Google and Facebook gain business advantage by analyzing large volumes of rapidly changing data about their users, but they are far from alone. A recent infographic from Get Satisfaction charts the volume of data stored in 17 key industry sectors, illustrating that most ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Big data has the potential to cut operating costs by nearly 50% across all sectors of manufacturing. Get Satisfaction makes several interesting claims about opportunities for big data in an infographic released this month. Market segments such as manufacturing are generating far more data (966 petabytes […] Read more »
For anyone who didn’t know, Facebook is a huge Hadoop user, and it does some very cool things to stretch the open source big data platform to meet Facebook’s unique needs. Today, it detailed how it migrated its 30-petabyte cluster from one data center to another. Read more »
Concurrent, the company providing the Cascading data workflow API, has raised a $900,000 seed round to capitalize on the newfound excitement around Hadoop. Cascading is an open-source API for creating and running data workflows atop Hadoop clusters. Read more »
All the speculation about how Yahoo’s Hadoop spinoff company, Hortonworks, will affect Cloudera and other companies providing Hadoop-based products might have been overblown. The company is still figuring out its strategy around offering a Hadoop distribution, which could be good news for competitors such as Cloudera. Read more »
[OpenStack] looks not only like an open-source alternative to Amazon Web Services and VMware vCloud in the public Infrastructure as a Service space, but also a democratizing force in the private-cloud software space. As my colleague Derrick Harris suggests, the open-source cloud-computing project OpenStack has come a […] Read more »
Alpine Data Labs, a predictive analytics startup that incubated within Greenplum (now part of EMC), is expanding its support beyond the Greenplum Database and into Oracle’s Exadata appliance and the open-source Postgres database. Alpine tries to distinguish itself by running entirely within companies’ analytic databases. Read more »
Something I thought about a lot while writing about OpenStack yesterday is how much it democratized access to cloud computing in just a year. But OpenStack is just one example of how information technology, overall, is undergoing a period of arguably unprecedented democratization. Read more »
The ability to analyze enormous amounts of data and use that to better target an ad, make a new drug or any number of other lofty goals is talked about constantly, but what about harnessing Hadoop for the rest of us? Read more »
The size of Hadoop deployments appears to have tripled since October, according to statistics that Cloudera is sharing. If accurate, they help prove assumptions that Hadoop usage grows quickly once organizations wrap their heads around how it is used. Read more »
Twitter announced Tuesday it has acquired BackType, an analytics platform aimed at helping companies and brands gauge their social media impact. The possible rationale for the deal is BackType’s Storm real-time big data processing platform that could help Twitter offer well-defined analytics. Read more »
Big data — as in managing and analyzing large volumes of information — has come a long way in the past couple of years. Among the greatest innovations might be the advent of real-time analytics, which allow the processing of information in real time to enable instantaneous decision-making. Read more »
For anyone concerned about the difficulty of doing advanced analytics tasks with Hadoop, the future might be just around the corner. A stealth-mode Palo Alto, Calif.–based startup called Platfora is working to make Hadoop usable even for the non-data scientists among us. Read more »
The fight for Hadoop dominance is officially on. While Hortonworks is busy answering questions about its product strategy, Cloudera and MapR will demonstrate new versions of their distributions overflowing with bells and whistles. And there are several other competitive products lurking in the background. Read more »
