Syncsort and Cloudera: Fast and Furious Big Data

Syncsort is joining the Cloudera Connect Partner, which intrigues me for a number of reasons.

First, this partnership is truly old-school Big Data meets new-school Big Data. After all, Syncsort’s roots extend to the 1960s and mainframes, whereas Cloudera is pretty cutting edge, offering an open source Hadoop-based Big Data solution.

Second, Syncsort’s DMExpress data integration software does high performance and high availability. Wikipedia notes it set a world record in 2008 for ETL performance by extracting, transforming, cleansing and loading 5.4 TB of data into a Vertica Analytic Database on a c-Class HP BladeSystem in 57 minutes.

Couple Syncsort’s speed with Hadoop’s ability to quickly process large amounts of data, and you’ve got a system that’s fast and furious.

As Silicon Angle points out, Cloudera is attracting third-party vendors that want to increase adoption of their own tools. Pentaho plans to integrate its Business Analytics data visualization tool with Cloudera Enterprise. Plus, the Hadoop distributor also signed a major agreement with HP to resell Cloudera Enterprise. HP also plans to build a dedicated Big Data appliance using Cloudera’s distribution.

Cloudera does seem to be one of the most popular players around when in comes to partnerships.

I have no data to actually prove this, but every week it seems there’s a new partnership or integration unveiled. That’s pretty amazing, given that Cloudera launched its first distribution just three years ago. Salesforce.com is the only other company that I’ve seen rival the partnership announcements.

Free Resources for the Week of Oct.1-5:

Tuesday, Oct. 2, 4 p.m. ET. Now that Big Data allows companies to use unstructured data, there’s the question of how to add context and use both structured and unstructured data to gain strategic insights. “The answers are usually found somewhere in between a SQL query and a Google-style search,” states the promotion for the Briefing Room’s upcoming free webinar, “Keeping in Context: A New Generation of Business Applications.”

Wednesday, Oct. 3, 9 a.m. PT. TDWI Research Analyst Philip Russom will discuss how Big Data can help you manage risks, enhance customer relationships and manage large supply chains in a live webinar, “Achieving Business Value through Big Analytics.”