We’re headed into the heart of convention season, past things like Oracle World and a couple of weeks away from Hadoop World in New York City. Cisco figures to be a major player in both, having been partnered with Oracle for over a year.

Sean McKeown, Cisco Technology Systems Architect, spoke of Cisco’s partnership with Oracle in developing a NoSQL non-relational database as well as their work on Hadoop over the last couple of years at Oracle World with colleague Didier Rombaut.

While Relational databases based in things like MySQL plug along the big transactional data realm, McKeown wants to see non-traditional, unstructured data be dealt with similarly. “We want to see Hadoop and similar big data architectures like the Oracle NoSQL database find their way into the datacenter and be equally easy to manage,” said McKeown.

McKeown identified three application-oriented areas away from the relational databases that Cisco is working on: Hadoop, massively parallel processing, and realtime NoSQL. The third area, realtime NoSQL is where Cisco’s partnership with Oracle comes in, according to McKeown.

“On the realtime NoSQL side, Cisco is very closely partnered with Oracle. They came out with their own NoSQL database about a year ago…They addressed the needs of their customers that these kinds of datasets that didn’t lend themselves well to a structured, RDBMS database management storage model.”

In order to do that, Oracle needed a reliable hardware vendor, something Cisco prides themselves on. Again, per McKeown, “They came to Cisco looking for a hardware partner that had the fabric, the bandwidth, the storage capability, and performance capability within the computing platform.”

According to McKeown, the result is performing impressively in a few benchmark tests. Per McKeown, with only a single rack of 15 servers, the Oracle Cisco database was able to drive over a million IOPS per second. “Here at OracleWorld, we’re highlighting a new benchmark that we’ve done with our UCS servers and our fabric running the NoSQL database and the Yahoo ICSB benchmark”

Cisco is also excited about its work on Hadoop, a proven and popular big data system but one that can always be refined. “Hadoop is the poster child for the big data market. It’s a batch-oriented heavy listing system for doing analysis of big data sets.”

They want their latest advancements, which according to McKeown will be on display at Hadoop World, to be industry-leading when it comes to networking and infrastructure. Further, they will be looking to integrate both computing and networking within the Hadoop framework. “We want to make sure that not only can our network fabric and infrastructure be the best network platform for running Hadoop but also that we have the right integrated solutions for both compute and network perspectives and we’ll have those on display at HadoopWorld.”

Cisco will be just one of the many vendors at Hadoop World in a couple of weeks looking to distinguish themselves.