BlueData Extends Big Data Ecosystem

Automating the Intelligence of Business Intelligence

One of the primary reasons there is so much interest in the concept of a software-defined data center (SDDC) is that right now it takes months for the average IT organization to provision a cluster. To address the clustering issue, a number of vendors have created stacks of automated management software that sit on top of their particular platforms. While that certainly advances the current state of the art when it comes to IT management, it also has the potential to lock IT organizations into a particular platform.

BlueData is making the case for creating a software-defined data center environment that is truly heterogeneous. It has added support for the Nutanix hyperconverged platform to the BlueData EPIC software platform, designed to make it simpler to deploy clusters hosting Big Data platforms such as Hadoop, Spark, Splunk and a variety of NoSQL databases.

BlueData CEO Kumar Sreekanti says IT organizations today need an elastic approach to provisioning clusters that can be accomplished in as little as five clicks of a mouse. BlueData built BlueData EPIC to run from the ground up on top of Docker containers.

Sreekanti says organizations also need the flexibility to employ that provisioning capability across a broad range of platforms to avoid getting locked into any one vendor. As part of that effort, BlueData has already established technology partnerships with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco, Dell, Big Switch Networks and Red Hat.

Thanks to the rise of SDDC, containers and hyperconverged infrastructure, the way data centers are managed is rapidly being transformed. The challenge now is navigating all those changes in a way that doesn’t create new chains of software that ultimately lock IT organizations into one particular platform well beyond the normal lifecycle of their server architectures.