Eight Big-Name Options for Big Data

In this slideshow, Loraine Lawson is focusing on the big technology vendors who either are taking a unique approach or are using partnerships to break into the Big Data market. Her goal here isn’t to cover every company, but rather to give you an idea of what the major enterprise companies (and a few other big tech names) are doing to address Big Data.

Click through for eight options available for dealing with Big Data.

If you’re looking for a cloud-based option, Amazon offers Elastic Map Reduce, which is a hosted, scalable Hadoop service. It also offers tools to help with analytics. Another Big Data option from Amazon: DynamoDB, a NoSQL database.

Not surprisingly, Google offers another cloud-based approach to Big Data. Google’s Big Data offerings are BigQuery — an analytical database — and the Prediction API, which is still an immature offering and has something to do with machine learning, according to Radar O’Reilly. Its cloud application hosting service, AppEngine, also offers a MapReduce facility.

Last year, HP acquired Big Data pure-play Vertica. It’s not a Hadoop solution, but it is a Big Data column-oriented analytics database, used by the likes of Zynga and Groupon. It does offer a Hadoop connector. There’s not a lot about it in the trade press, but it totals $84 million of HP’s $550 million in Big Data revenue.

Hortonworks is helping Microsoft develop its own Hadoop-based offering on Windows Server and Windows Azure, for a third cloud-based option. Radar O’Reilly recently published a detailed look at Microsoft’s Big Data strategy if you’d like to learn more. Microsoft is thinking big picture on this one: Word is, Redmond plans to contribute its adaptations back to the Apache Hadoop project, which means anybody will be able to run a purely open source Hadoop on Windows.

Oracle introduced its Big Data Appliance in January at the surprising low price point of $450,000 with 12 percent hardware and software maintenance, which works out to be $54,000. This solution uses the Cloudera distribution of Hadoop, plus Cloudera Manager and R.

SAP’s approach to Big Data is to focus on integrating it with other tools, which, honestly, makes it difficult to describe. It offers SAP HANA for transactional data. For large data stores, like Hadoop, “SAP is entering this market through Sybase IQ, which has added significant Map-Reduce capabilities,” according to this Forbes article, which offers a very detailed assessment of SAP’s Big Data approach.

Teradata Aster comes in both the basic software platform and as an appliance. It includes both SQL and MapReduce analytic processing.

SAS is working on a solution that marries Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) with in-memory analytics.