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July 27, 2012

This Week’s Big Data Top 5

This week’s top five news items from the world of big data include announcements related to real-time SQL with a Hadoop kick; some prime real estate housing massive amounts of genomic data; a startup that just scored $25 million to further its big data ambitions and more.

Without further delay, let’s delve in with the first item that caught our eye this week:

MapR Partnership Focuses on Real-Time SQL

Drawn to Scale, creator of Spire, the real time database for Hadoop, this week announced a partnership with MapR Technologies, Inc., the provider of the open, enterprise-focused distribution for Apache Hadoop. Drawn to Scale will be re-distributing MapR’s M3 Edition as part of an integrated package inside of Spire. 

Enterprises and startups try to leverage high volume big data to create a richer user experience in the world of web and mobile, but lack SQL and the performance users expect. This requires a highly available distributed system with a secondary distributed index for instant data access. Then add web friendly interfaces to work with a wide range of front end applications. Drawn to Scale says that Spire with M3 inside provides a single deployable big data database that allows developers to work with Hadoop as if it were a traditional RDBMS.

“Real-time SQL on Hadoop is a big gap in the market that is addressed by Spire,” said Jack Norris, VP of marketing, MapR Technologies. ”Spire is a complementary solution to our products and it made sense to work with Drawn to Scale to make it easier for customers to deploy M3, pre-integrated with Spire, for real-time SQL-based workloads.”

Next — NYC Center Focuses on Bioinformatics, Data Warehousing >


NYC Center Focuses on Bioinformatics, Data Warehousing

The New York Genome Center (NYGC) and Edward J. Minskoff Equities, Inc. (EJME) are pleased to announce the execution of a 20-year lease for 170,000 square feet at 101 Avenue of the Americas, one of EJME’s premier high-rise properties in Manhattan’s Hudson Square neighborhood.

The NYGC headquarters, located on seven floors of this newly renovated, LEED Silver-certified building, will begin construction in July. The $47 million facility build-out, expected to be completed by mid-2013, will include sequencing, bioinformatics, and research labs, an Innovation Center to advance new technologies, and computing infrastructure to handle the processing and storage of massive amounts of new data. The facility will also include a ground-floor auditorium and café, training facilities, and administrative offices. Initially housing 100 employees, the center is expected to grow to 500+ employees over the first five years of operations.

Major computing support for these activities will be provided at the new Sabey Intergate.Manhattan facility at 375 Pearl Street, where NYGC has established its offsite data center. The entire facility is secure within the boundaries of 1 Police Plaza; guarded by NYPD and Homeland Security personnel.

NYGC began offering sequencing, bioinformatics, and data storage services in February 2012, and expanded these services in mid-2012 through the launch of its pilot lab facilities at The Rockefeller University. The 101 Avenue of the Americas location will allow for these services and research operations to expand dramatically.

“This announcement marks another important milestone for NYGC, our Institutional Founding Members, and the City and State of New York,” notes Nancy J. Kelley, Founding Executive Director of NYGC. “Our facility will be home to one of the world’s largest genomic centers, combining innovative thinking, leading edge technology, and an entrepreneurial spirit.”

NYGC’s long-term service agreement with Sabey will enable NYGC to create a scalable system that will grow along with the center and seamlessly link its members and other collaborators. To augment data storage with low-cost, sustainable hydro power, NYCG will also use Sabey’s Intergate.Quincy data center in Washington state and Sabey’s IGX network that interconnects the company’s data centers throughout the U.S.

Next — Cloudera, HP Join Forces for Hadoop >


Cloudera, HP Join Forces for Hadoop

This week Cloudera and HP announced a partnership to help users deploy, manage and scale Hadoop systems quickly to gain more effective insight from their business data.

The two will deliver open standards-based reference architectures that address management issues and accelerate deployment of Hadoop Cluster environments. Clients can purchase the Cloudera Enterprise platform and future Cloudera products either directly from HP or bundled in HP AppSystem for Apache Hadoop.

The new HP reference architecture for Apache Hadoop for Cloudera and HP AppSystem for Apache Hadoop – Cloudera are based on HP Converged Infrastructure. They include the Cloudera Enterprise platform and HP Insight Cluster Manager Utility (CMU) software.  The reseller agreement also enables HP and Cloudera to preload the combined solutions at the factory, eliminating the complexities associated with deploying, implementing and managing a Hadoop cluster environment.

Cloudera and HP say that the marriage of their technologies “enhances total cluster performance, reliability and high-availability capabilities with tools that easily move from test environments to full production.”

“Companies are increasingly turning to Apache Hadoop to help manage petabytes of information, but are finding they spend more time on operations and maintenance than on strategic data analysis,” said Paul Miller, vice president, Converged Application Systems, Enterprise Group, HP. “HP Converged Infrastructure provides a strong portfolio of comprehensive big data management tools that when combined with Cloudera’s solutions, bring the benefits of Hadoop to clients faster without the administrative burden.”

Next — Startup Scores $25 Million for Big Data Drive >


Startup Scores $25 Million for Big Data Drive

Startup GoodData announced this week that it has closed $25 million in Series C funding led by Tenaya Capital, with participation from new investor Next World Capital, and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst Partners, Fidelity Growth Partners and Windcrest Partners. The company has raised $53.5 million in total to date.

“We are pioneering a new approach to business intelligence that will monetize and bring big data to life.”

Brian Paul, Managing Director at Tenaya Capital will join the board of directors. Other existing board members include John O’Farrell, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz; Larry Bohn, Managing Director of General Catalyst Partners; James Gellert, Partner at Windcrest Partners, Dave Girouard, former General Manager of Google Enterprise, and Roman Stanek, founder and CEO of GoodData.

Since the company was founded, more than 6,000 customers at leading global organizations have adopted GoodData to monetize their data. In 2011, the company posted 600 percent bookings growth and more than doubled employees and customers, making GoodData one of the fastest growing companies in the space.

GoodData will use the new funding to continue to invest in technology innovation as well as build sales and marketing programs to raise awareness and accelerate adoption of its disruptive, cloud-based platform.

“It’s time to pull the plug on the old business intelligence model — it’s clear that it is obsolete,” said Roman Stanek, founder and CEO of GoodData. “We are pioneering a new approach to business intelligence that will monetize and bring big data to life.”

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