and custom implementations of the
technology.
In addition to many open-source
support tools such as Clojure and
Thrift, dozens of commercial
options exist, though many are
built using Hadoop as the foundation. The PricewaterhouseCoopers
Center for Technology and Innovation has published an in-depth
guide to the big data building blocks
and how they relate to both IT
deployment and business usage.
One example of a commercial
vendor that builds on Hadoop is
Datameer, which provides a platform to collect and read different kinds of large data stores, put
them into a Hadoop framework,
and then use tools for analysis.
Basically, Datameer seeks to hide
the complexity of Hadoop and
provide analysis tools on top of
it. Datameer’s sweet spot is data
sources that exceed 10TB, the size
at which Datameer says companies
begin to struggle with using traditional technologies for data analysis.
Other commercial vendors offering similar approaches to big data
analytics include Appistry, Cloude-ra, Drawn to Scale HQ, Goto Metrics,
Karmasphere and Talend. And the
Do smaller
businesses
really need
access to big
data? Simply
put, yes.
three main database vendors — IBM,
Microsoft and Oracle — all support
Hadoop interaction, though in
different ways. The open-source
BI vendor Pentaho also supports
Hadoop.
Big Data Fits
Businesses of All Sizes
Big data is not just about size; it is
also about performance, regardless of the data set’s dimensions.
Performance matters for immediate
analytics, such as assessing customers’ behavior on a website to better
understand what support they
need or what product they seek, or
figuring out implications of current
weather and other conditions on
delivery routing and scheduling.
That is where server clusters,
high-performance file systems
and parallel processing come into
play. In the past, those technologies
were too expensive for all but the
largest businesses. Today, virtual-
