Red Hat embraces Hadoop and big data
Red Hat, the world’s leading business Linux company, has announced its big data direction and enterprise programs. In addition, Red Hat has said that it will contribute its Red Hat Storage Hadoop plug-in to the Apache Hadoop open community to help transform Red Hat Storage into a fully-supported, Hadoop-compatible file system.
The Raleigh, NC-based company won't be doing it by itself. The company stated that it will be "building a robust network of ecosystem and enterprise integration partners to deliver comprehensive big data solutions to enterprise customers." So, for example, Red Hat is working with the open cloud community, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), to support big data customers.
Once past the development, proof-of-concept, and pre-production phases of big data projects, corporate workloads can then be moved to a company's private clouds to scale up the analytics with the larger data set.
According to Red Hat, "an open hybrid cloud environment enables enterprises to transfer workloads from the public cloud into their private cloud without the need to re-tool their applications. Red Hat is actively engaged in the open cloud community through projects like OpenStack and Red Hat's own OpenShift Origin to help meet these enterprise big data expectations both today and in the future."
To make this happen, Red Hat is adding big data functionality to its product portfolio. For infrastructure that means Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Red Hat Storage, which uses the proven GlusterFS distributed file system. Currently in technology preview, the Red Hat Storage Apache Hadoop plug-in provides a new storage option for enterprise Hadoop deployments that delivers enterprise storage features while maintaining application programming interface (API) compatibility and local data access.
Read this
Red Hat Storage will also work with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1. This integration offers enterprises reduced operational costs, expanded portability, choice of infrastructure, scalability, availability and the power of community-driven innovation with the contributions of the open-source oVirt and Gluster projects.
To access big data on these platforms, Red Hat offers its open-source JBoss middleware; and Red Hat plans to partner with leading big data software and hardware providers to offer interoperability. Development of certified and documented reference architectures are expected to allow users to integrate and install comprehensive enterprise big data solutions. In turn, Red Hat states, this will lead to the delivery of a comprehensive big data solutions to its customers through leading enterprise integration partners utilizing the reference architectures developed by Red Hat and its big data ecosystem partners.
Can Red Hat pull all this off? Ashish Nadkarni, IDC's research director of Storage System, thinks so. “Red Hat is uniquely positioned to excel in enterprise big data solutions, a market that IDC expects to grow from $6 billion in 2011 to $23.8 billion in 2016. Red Hat is one of the very few infrastructure providers that can deliver a comprehensive big data solution because of the breadth of its infrastructure solutions and application platforms for on-premises or cloud delivery models. As a leading contributor to open source communities developing essential technologies for the big data IT stack – from Linux to OpenStack Origin and Gluster – Red Hat will continue to play a pivotal role in Big Data."
Related Stories: