VMware's Hadoop Big Data strategy: smart or wrong?

Although many IT departments want to host applications that handle huge amounts of data in the cloud, the most popular "big data" platform needs to focus on hardware because it can cause reliability problems.

This problem may change with VMware's Apache Software Foundation (ASF) Open source project Serengeti. This project will allow businesses to deploy and manage Apache Hadoop on vsphere 5.0 in the cloud and virtual environments.

Hadoop on the virtual infrastructure cloud eliminates the problem of reliability, which can be automatically restarted if a node fails with a Vsphere,hadoop application.

In addition, the virtualization giant is also working with members of the Hadoop community, including Cloudera Inc., Greenplum, Hortonworks, IBM, and continues to work on ASF scalability, which is the key to Hadoop's "virtualization Perception".

VMware's Hadoop strategy: smart or wrong?

Some people say VMware is sensible to adapt to Hadoop on vsphere and will be a competitor in the Big data field.

"With big data getting bigger every day, it's obvious that there's a virtual opportunity for a workload with large data digestion," said Al Hilwa, director of the IDC Application development software project.

Large data platforms like Hadoop and other distributed databases are missing modern application stacks in VMware's vfabric applications, said Jeffrey Reed, an application development manager for Logicalis Group, a UK cloud provider.

"If VMware doesn't offer its own hadoop or a solution like Hadoop, its strategy around Hadoop is critical, which is the ecosystem of distributed vendors," says Reed.

However, not everyone agrees with the analyst's point of view.

"VMware's strategy for highly available Hadoop is misleading," Orchestratus's CEO, Shlomo Swidler, said, "it delivers high availability through infrastructure-level support, but ha at the software level is the benchmark for modern applications," Swidler added.

"The most important thing is to make Hadoop a good corporate citizen," said Tony Baer, the chief analyst at the research firm Ovum, "Hadoop fault tolerance, virtualization is one of the technologies that help achieve that," Baer added.

Serengeti can be downloaded for free through the Apache 2.0 license, allowing the administrator to complete the Hadoop cluster deployment in a minute with a click.

In addition, VMware is working with Hadoop partners to change the Hadoop Distributed File system and Hadoop mapreduce development. Last month, VMware also announced support for its cloud Foundry in OpenStack.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)