EMC(s emc) on Tuesday launched its Isilon NAS product melded with EMC’s own Greenplum Hadoop distribution.
This is the latest in a series of vendor moves to address customers’ need to make sense out of massive amounts of structured and unstructured data generated by people, by applications, by servers and by devices. The resulting trove is too much for traditional relational databases and ancillary tools to handle, which is why legacy IT vendors from IBM(s ibm) to Microsoft(s msft) are diving into Hadoop, the framework seen as best suited for handling all this distributed and diverse information.
EMC’s pitch boils down to its view that Isilon’s native OneFS file system can do a better job handling big data than Hadoop’s native HDFS. “You can’t just say ‘big data’ and cross yourself. We’re fleshing out the story,” said Jeremy Burton, EVP with EMC, in an interview last week. “With Hadoop, we’ve got a distribution we’ve integrated with Greenplum to run queries across both [data sets.] Hadoop’s HDFS file system — it’s cheap and cheerful and useful. But at a petabyte scale, why not run OneFS? If you want to scale out to a petabyte, drop in Isilon and you’re done. If you need to add more nodes to the cluster, our file system automatically takes care of them.”
In this offering, Isilon’s OneFS integrates the Hadoop Distributed File System protocol so it can apply it to whatever massive amounts of information reside in its scale-out storage repository. EMC’s enterprise Hadoop distribution uses the MAPR file system.
The new Isilon-Greenplum product, available now, also shows that EMC has been busily integrating a series of acquisitions for an assault on the big data problem. EMC bought Isilon in July 2010 and Greenplum along with its analytic database appliance, the following November.
