The Hadoop Challenge for Business Intelligence and Analytics Users
While Hadoop may make Big Data more accessible, the setting up of a Hadoop cluster on commodity servers is not particularly simple.
To help IT organizations automate that process, Continuuity today announces it is contributing Loom, cluster management software that automates the process of provisioning a Hadoop cluster, to the open source community.
Continuuity CEO Jonathan Gray says it is a byproduct of the company’s effort to provide an application development environment for Hadoop that can be deployed on a private or public cloud. As customers began to build applications on the Continuuity platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment, it became apparent they needed help with the DevOps elements of Hadoop.
Initially, Continuuity tried to use scripts and Chef open source tools to solve that problem. But Gray says it quickly became apparent that providing an orchestration tool in the form of Loom that leverages application programming interfaces would be a simpler and more elegant approach to solving the problem.
When it comes to Big Data, there’s a tendency to overlook the fundamental IT operational challenges associated with managing large clusters. Given the fact that most organizations are not going to hire a lot of extra people to manage those clusters, finding a way to automate that process is quickly becoming a more significant priority.
