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October 13, 2012

This Week’s Big Data Big Five

It’s been a busy week here at Datanami. We’ve just returned from the SAS Premier Business Leadership Summit in Las Vegas where we talked with some analytics leaders at Fortune 500 companies about their data operations. We also have an in-depth chat with some of lead architects (and CTO) at SAS who built the new HDFS capabilities in their high performance analytics offering. Stay tuned in the coming week for that.

As we prepare to head into Hadoop World, which is just over a week in New York City (we’ll be reporting live) we’ve seen an uptick in the news cycle. This week we bring announcements from the world of Hadoop, with Hortonworks and a new BI arrangement; Cloudera’s pitch to big government; some positive news from RainStor and more…

Without further delay, let’s dive in…

Hortonworks Powers BI with Hadoop

Hortonworks today announced the availability of the Hortonworks Hive ODBC Driver 1.0 for the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP).

With this free-of-charge add-on, Hortonworks delivers integration of HDP with business intelligence (BI) tools to enable business analysts to query, analyze and visualize data from within Hadoop. The new driver provides connectivity to Excel, Microstrategy, PowerPivot, Tableau and other leading BI tools.

Based on Simba’s ODBC 3.52 driver for Hadoop/Hive, Hortonworks Hive ODBC Driver 1.0 provides users with SQL application functionality and real-time analytic reporting capabilities. A 100-percent open source platform powered by Hadoop, HDP provides a data management infrastructure that includes management, monitoring, metadata and data integration services.

Next–SAS Boosts Big Data Analytics >

SAS  Boosts Big Data Analytics

SAS High-Performance Analytics Server now supports analytics, including text mining and optimization. And the predictive modeling capabilities of SAS High-Performance Analytics Server will now also use Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).

The SAS high-performance product set includes the in-memory big data visualization of SAS Visual Analytics and increased industry-specific and horizontal analytic solutions. The latest, SAS High-Performance Marketing Optimization, was also announced.

Early users of SAS High-Performance Analytics Server report analytic computing time shrinking from days and hours to minutes, even seconds.

SAS High-Performance Analytics Server on database appliances from Teradata or EMC Greenplum includes text data. SAS Enterprise MinerT users can build predictive and descriptive models based on large data volumes.

Organizations use SAS analytics to detect fraud, minimize risk, increase response rates for marketing campaigns and curb customer attrition. SAS High-Performance Analytics means finding fraud before claims are paid, evaluating risk more frequently, improving marketing campaigns and reaching valuable customers before they defect.

The updates also enhance large-scale optimization with select high-performance capabilities in existing SAS/OR procedures. SAS High-Performance Analytics Server combines true mathematical optimization – versus simple rules-based analysis and user-defined constraint modeling – with big data.

The latest SAS High-Performance Analytic Server supports HDFS in deployments on industry-standard hardware platforms.

SAS/ACCESS Interface to Hadoop, introduced in February, is among nearly 30 packaged solutions for data connectivity and integration between SAS and third-party data sources, including data warehouse appliances, enterprise applications, non-relational mainframe data sources and popular relational databases.

SAS augments Hadoop with analytics, plus metadata, security and lineage capabilities, ensuring that Hadoop will be enterprise-ready.

SAS Data Management mitigates the lack of mature tools for developing and managing Hadoop deployments, helping organizations gain value from Hadoop more quickly with fewer resources. Hadoop integration with SAS Information Management provides:

A graphical SAS user interface that uses Pig, Hive, MapReduce and HDFS commands.

Standard SAS Data Integration Studio transformations to work with Hadoop data and build job flows.

Streamlined code generation with visual editing and a built-in syntax checker for Pig and MapReduce code.

SAS DataFlux data quality assurance for data coming in or out of Hadoop.

Next–Cloudera Assists Recommendations Report for Big Data in Government

 

Cloudera Assists Recommendations Report for Big Data in Government

Cloudera collaborated with leading experts from both industry and academia to issue the report “Demystifying Big Data: A Practical Guide To Transforming The Business of Government.” The report outlines a comprehensive roadmap to using Big Data in the federal government to better serve the American public.

As a member of TechAmerica Foundation’s Big Data Commission, Cloudera worked alongside industry leaders to demystify the term “Big Data” and articulate the business value of Big Data for government agencies. This comprehensive and first-of-its-kind report defines key terms; explains the underlying technology in simple terms; and identifies best practices and lessons learned from early efforts. The report also offers a set of policy recommendations and practical steps agencies can take to get started on Big Data initiatives.

“Government agencies at the Federal, State and Local level are confronting the same challenge that commercial organizations have been struggling with in recent years: how to best capture and utilize the increasing amount of data that is coming from more sources than ever before. Making sense of that increased volume of data and using it to drive informed policies and offer better services for citizens demands new tools and new approaches by government IT staff and analysts,” said Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera and TechAmerica Commissioner. “For example, data captured from smart grids can be used to better understand energy production and demand to help drive policies that let utilities and consumers utilize energy more efficiently. We are proud to be part of the TechAmerica Big Data Commission as we work toward creating a better understanding of Big Data and how it can be used to improve policies and services.”

“The Big Data commission is another example of the power to create change when the technology industry and government work hand-in-hand,” said Jennifer Kerber, President of the TechAmerica Foundation. “Big Data has the power to transform how government delivers services to citizens, and it is one of the many new tools available to enhance our daily lives.”

Complementing the report’s Practical Roadmap and Key Policy Recommendations is the Business Value of Big Data, described as:

Improving decision-making and operational intelligence

Eliminating waste, fraud and abuse

Innovating new business models and stakeholder services

The full Commission report can be found here:http://www.techamerica.org/Docs/fileManager.cfm?f=techamerica-bigdatareport-final.pdf

Next—RainStor Secures $12 million in Series C Funding

 

RainStor Secures $12 Million in Series C Funding

 RainStor announced it has raised $12 million in Series C funding from leading global financial services organization, Credit Suisse and Rogers Venture Partners. Existing investors Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures, Storm Ventures and The Dow Chemical Company also participated in the round.

The new funding will be used to accelerate engineering, expand a world-class team across direct and indirect sales and marketing to maintain Big Data market leadership serving financial services, government, communications and other sectors driving the Big Data wave.

RainStor’s database has been adopted by over 100 global enterprises today addressing the challenge of managing Big Data, meeting compliance regulations. Customers deploy RainStor across a variety of low cost scalable hardware platforms including SAN, NAS, CAS in addition to Cloud and operates natively on Apache Hadoop. RainStor provides analytic and query access via standard SQL, popular BI tools and native MapReduce when running on HDFS.

Next—DataDirect Networks Advances Automotive Research >

 

DataDirect Networks Advances Automotive Research

DataDirect Networks (DDN) announced that High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), home to the world’s 24th fastest supercomputer according to the recently released Top500.org rankings, has selected DDN SFA storage technology to a range of research efforts including the work in its Automotive Simulation Center (ASCS).

Working with DDN to maximize the performance of data-intensive applications, HLRS has launched simulation and design partnerships with industry partners that include Ansys, Porsche AG and T-Systems, while also supporting pan-European computational simulation in climatology, physics, energy, and other areas of science and technology. HLRS is one of the centers in the European PRACE initiative and maintains a focus on mechanical simulation — especially computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and computer automated engineering (CAE) at massive scale.

With over 3,500 compute nodes and over 100,000 compute cores, this new HLRS resource, Hermit, is capable of delivering a peak performance of more than 1 quadrillion calculations per second. The system, which was delivered by Cray, is configured with over 2.5PB of DDN SFA storage capacity to support HLRS’ Lustre file system and HLRS’ Big Data applications.

More than 60% of the world’s 100 fastest supercomputers as ranked by Top500.org rely on DDN storage systems, and the company’s SFA technology is a platform of choice for the world’s most demanding deployments.

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