One Platform for the Hadoop Stack (distributions and open source projects)

Last week Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR were all recognized within The Forrester Wave?: Big Data Hadoop Distributions report. Each were rightfully recognized for their unique strengths and capabilities. A few weeks prior to the Forrester release, Gartner’s Merv Adrian pointed out in his blog , “Supported Hadoop Stack Continues Expansion”, that we are now up to 17 Hadoop projects. Indeed, this is a lot to keep track of for Enterprise IT and Data Science.

In 2012, VMware’s VP of R&D (Kumar Sreekanti) and Senior Architect of Storage & Availability (Tom Phelan) decided to embark on a venture to solve this Big Data infrastructure complexity.  After years of speaking with customers about their frustrations, they determined that developing one platform that made it easier, faster and more cost effective to deploy Big Data infrastructure, on-premises, was something that enterprise IT and Data Science desperately needed. It was these very customers that helped architect what later would become BlueData Software.  These customers outlined the need for:

• One platform that embedded all the major industry leading distributions (unmodified) from Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR.
• One platform, with an intuitive drop-down interface, to dynamically launch clusters on whichever distribution they selected in minutes instead of weeks/months.
• One platform which allowed all open-source tools and commercial BI/ETL applications to run turn-key from a click of box.
• One platform that allowed all data to be read as HDFS, eliminating the need to copy and move data.
• One platform that separated compute and storage, leveraging Docker containers.
• One platform that significantly reduced capex and opex spends through virtualization, while still achieving bare-metal performance.

Today, BlueData is extremely proud of the decision it made years ago to partner with Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR and we congratulate our friends on their recent recognition.