DDN has developed a Hadoop solution that is all about time to value: It simplifies rollout so that enterprises can get up and running more quickly, provides typical DDN performance to accelerate data processing, and reduces the amount of time needed to maintain a Hadoop solution.” said Dave Vellante, Chief Research Officer, Wikibon.org. “For enterprises with a deluge of data but a limited IT budget, the DDN hScaler appliance should be on the short list of potential solutions.”
Today Nimbus Data Systems announced HALO 2013, an enhanced version of the company’s award-winning storage operating system. HALO 2013 features improved analytics to gauge the performance and efficiency of Nimbus Data flash memory arrays.
With a new REST-based API, HALO 2013 gives administrators full access to all Nimbus features and statistics, facilitating storage management in large multi-vendor data centers. HALO Mobile brings these advanced monitoring features to the palm of your hand, streaming live statistics directly to iOS and Android-based smartphones and tablets.
Nimbus Data is a pioneer in all-flash storage systems, and today’s announcement extends the first-mover advantage the company has established for itself,” says Benjamin Woo, managing director of Neuralytix, an industry analyst firm. “Nimbus Data recognizes the importance of instrumentation and integration, and providing an open API to the full features of its flash arrays will help drive down total cost of ownership.”
Part of the ClusterStor family, ClusterStor 6000 is designed to support installations with linear performance scalability in less space, scaling from up to 6 gigabytes per second to installations providing 1 terabyte per second file system throughput, as well as linear data storage capacity from terabytes up to tens of petabytes.
Today Nvidia announced that growing ranks of Python users can now take full advantage of GPU acceleration for HPC and Big Data analytics applications by using the CUDA parallel programming model. As a popular, easy-to-use language, Python enables users to write high-level software code that captures their algorithmic ideas without delving deep into programming details. Python’s extensive libraries and advanced features make it ideal for a broad range of HPC science, engineering and big data analytics applications.
Our research group typically prototypes and iterates new ideas and algorithms in Python and then rewrites the algorithm in C or C++ once the algorithm is proven effective,” said Vijay Pande, professor of Chemistry and of Structural Biology and Computer Science at Stanford University. “CUDA support in Python enables us to write performance code while maintaining the productivity offered by Python.”
Support for CUDA parallel programming comes from NumbaPro, a Python compiler in the new Anaconda Accelerate product from Continuum Analytics. This support was made possible by Nvidia’s contribution of the CUDA compiler source code into the core and parallel thread execution backend of LLVM, a widely used open source compiler infrastructure. Read the Full Story.
Microsoft, ever alert to strategies to prolong the shelf life of some of its aging products, is touting Excel as an analytics engine for Big Data. As Scotty said in that famous Star War’s episode in which he time traveled back to the 20th century and had to use a keyboard to access a computer, “How quaint.”
Michael Fitzgerald, writing in Information Week’s Global CIO section about a Microsoft press conference he attended last week, had a similar reaction. He heard the head of Microsoft’s New England district say that Excel has a major role in the use of Big Data. It seems that two years ago the venerable spreadsheet could only handle 64,000 rows of data. Today Excel has been supercharged to manipulate more than 100 million rows of data in computer memory, making it a candidate for the role of analytic engine for the masses.
Fitzgerald’s response: “How trivial.”
It was almost painful sitting in a Microsoft conference room Thursday listening to executives say that Excel — Excel! — was going to help the corporate masses put the capital letters on Big Data.”
To reinforce its message, Microsoft had a customer, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, tell the assembled journalists about its experience with Microsoft’s version of Hadoop and the use of Excel to build predictive analytical models.
Unimpressed, Fitzgerald asks, “Has Excel become an afterthought in corporations? For Microsoft the answer is not trivial.”
At the RSA Conference 2013 being held in San Francisco this week, a panel made up of chief information security officers (CISOs) exhibited all the symptoms of Big Data Security fatigue.
Reporting in Network World, Ellen Messmer notes that the Big Data Security is a major theme at this year’s conference, describing the concept as “the idea that massive amounts of data related to both network security and of business context should be stockpiled to be analyzed to pinpoint malware, rogue insiders and stealthy attacks aimed at stealing sensitive data.”
But the CISOs were having none of it. Writes Messmer:
“… the four chief information security officers (CISO) on a conference panel about Big Data Security indicated that they already have their hands full with plenty of security data to analyze on a daily basis to defend their corporate networks, and for now, that’s enough. Their viewpoints suggest it may be a while before enterprises, even very large ones, clamor for the kind of Big Data Security deployments that IBM, HP and RSA, the security division of EMC, now insist is the next big thing in corporate security.”
However, in his keynote speech, Art Coviello, Executive Vice President of EMC Corporation and Executive Chairman of RSA noted that because Big Data can potentially “enable billions of devices to be connected, we will see more automated attacks that are destructive,” and cautioned that our newfound ability to access large data stores in the cloud is a two-edged sword – our adversaries can access these stores as well. CISOs, take note.
In this slidecast, Brian Christian from Zettaset presents: Examining Hadoop as a Big Data Risk in the Enterprise.
While the open source framework has enabled Hadoop to logically grow and expand, business and government enterprise organizations face deployment and management challenges with Hadoop. Hadoop’s core specifications are still being developed by the Apache community, and thus far, do not adequately address enterprise requirements, such as support for robust security and regulatory compliance mandates such as HIPAA and SOX, for example.”
The conference will focus on the following topics: Progress of Exascale in the European Union, high-performance interconnects, Accelerators and Parallel I/O, communication libraries (MPI, SHMEM, PGAS), GPU computing (CUDA, OpenCL) Big Data, advanced topics / technologies / development including server and storage systems, and hands-on clustering, network, troubleshooting, tuning, optimizations. The conference is open to the public and will bring together system managers, researchers, developers, computational scientists and industry affiliates.
Having been to this event several times, I can tell you that Lugano is one of the most beautiful towns in the world. It’s a solid three-day workshop, and this year they’ll be treating attendees to a boat trip on lake Lugano with an on-board apero and dinner.
In this slidecast, Vishnu Bhat from Infosys presents an overview of the company’s all-new BigDataEdge platform for insight management.
Enterprises today cannot afford to spend an inordinate amount of time making sense of the data deluge that surrounds them,” said Vishnu Bhat, VP of Cloud at Infosys. “Infosys BigDataEdge draws upon our deep research & development capabilities and proven expertise in Big Data and analytics to help clients turn data into revenues faster. This unique platform is already enabling ten global organizations to develop actionable insights in a matter of days and act on them from day one.”
Today Xyratex announced that the company has acquired the original Lustre trademark, logo, website and associated intellectual property from Oracle, and will assume responsibility for providing support to Lustre customers going forward. The company say it plans to advance the global Lustre portfolio by supporting the community-oriented development of Lustre as an open source file system and continuing to work in conjunction with the broader community to help chart the best path forward for this key technology.
Lustre is a powerful open source file system, and Xyratex strongly believes that all members of the Lustre community need to continue to play a part in the evolution of the code and the benefits it delivers over the long term,” said Steve Barber, CEO of Xyratex. “We want to ensure that current Lustre customers get the best possible feature roadmap and support, and we intend to engage the entire community to advance the Lustre technology. We also appreciate Oracle’s support of Lustre, and their efforts to ensure the long-term success of the technology.”
From this reporter’s perspective, this is really good news for the Lustre community. Oracle owned the Lustre assets since it acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010, and the company didn’t take kindly to organizations using the Lustre trademark in the past. Now with these assets in the hands of an active Lustre community member (Xyratex is a board-level sponsor of OpenSFS), one could say that Jack has effectively rescued the Open Source Goose from the mean old Giant.
OpenSFS actively supports the HPC open source file system community of which Xyratex is an active Member,” said Norm Morse, CEO at OpenSFS. “This acquisition gives Xyratex a great opportunity in concert with other members of the Lustre community to continue the stability needed to ensure Lustre remains a vital part of HPC going forward. We look forward to working with Xyratex in the future.”
With their ClusterStor products now being distributed by the likes of Cray, HP, and Dell, Xyratex is now well-positioned to move forward with their increasing focus on HPC and Big Data markets. Powered by Lustre, ClusterStor technology not only holds the title for world’s fastest file system at over 1 Terabyte/sec, they managed to accomplish that number with about half the storage devices of the next runner-up.
Microsoft, ever alert to strategies to prolong the shelf life of some of its aging products, is touting Excel as an analytics engine for Big Data. As Scotty said in that famous Star War’s episode in which he time traveled back to the 20th century and had to use a keyboard to access a computer, “How quaint.”
