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December 2, 2011

Hadoop Alternative Lands on Amazon’s Cloud

Datanami Staff

This week HPCC Systems, which provides an alternative platform to Hadoop, announced that their  Thor Data Refinery Cluster, which is the data delivery engine behind the processing power of their platform, will be available via Amazon Web Services.

In the increasingly noisy Hadoop space, it is difficult to stand out, whether with a new distribution or new analytics layer but HPCC Systems is taking an entirely different approach to finding inroads to new big data customers. Unlike much of the ecosystem that has developed around Hadoop, HPCC Systems is relying on technology it built for internal use over a decade ago and only recently made public as a commercial option.

LexisNexis Risk Solutions, which is peddling the Hadoop alternative, says that unlike the open source base of Hadoop, their offering is stable and enterprise-ready. They claim that by putting the capability to run big data analytics in the cloud, they are opening new doors for customers who want to take advantage of massive parallel processing on huge datasets, but are unsure about the reliability of Hadoop for their mission-critical data.

The company describes the Thor Data Refinery Cluster at the heart of the announcement with AWS, noting that its primary role is to take in vast datasets, transform, link and index them while taking advantage of massive parallelism. According to LexisNexis Risk Solutions, using the Thor Refinery Cluster in the cloud “provides a powerful combination designed to make big data analytics computing easier for developers.”

According to the release of the news about big data processing in the cloud, the company also said, “In addition to the Thor Data Refinery Cluster, HPCC Systems is comprised of a single architecture, a consistent data-centric programming language called ECL, and the Roxie Rapid Data Delivery Cluster. The core of the technology platform is the Enterprise Control Language (ECL), which is a declarative, data-centric programming language optimized for large-scale data management and query processing. The Roxie Rapid Data Delivery Cluster provides highly scalable, high-performance online query processing and data warehouse capabilities.”

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