Organizations as diverse as Northrop Grumman (NOC), Harvard University, Zynga, and the New York Stock Exchange (NYX) have filled job websites with requests for talented puppeteers and master chefs. A quick dig into the job listings reveals that these positions have nothing to do with office entertainment or gourmet meals. Instead, the companies want people who have mastered Puppet or Chef, competing softwar ...

We get asked a lot of questions about how to select Apache Hadoop worker node hardware. During my time at Yahoo!, we bought a lot of nodes with 6*2TB SATA drives, 24GB RAM and 8 cores in a dual socket configuration. This has proven to be a pretty good configuration. This year, I’ve seen systems with 12*2TB SATA drives, 48GB RAM and 8 cores in a dual socket configurations. We will see a move to 3TB drives th ...

BigDataCloud’s theme of “Hadoop Powered Predictions & Recommendations Engines” attracted over 100 people to the meetup last night, sponsored by LexisNexis & ThirdEyeCloud. The attendees thronged the LexisNexis’s booth about its newly debuted HPCC Systems & got an understanding of how its Hadoop alternative can actually solve “Big Data” challenges in enterprises. The attendees also had a chance to “meet & gr ...

Hadoop technologies have started to mature and many of us are now tasked at implementing Hadoop MapReduce based solutions at our respective organizations. From our own practical experiences, we can tell that the going is not going to be as smooth as you might have expected. That’s what peaked our interest in this webinar by Platform Computing: Top Issues IT faces with Hadoop MapReduce This webinar claims th ...

Third Eye is launching "Byte Sized Hadoop" classes – for as low as $125/class! These Hadoop classes will be offered byte-sized, 3 hours each, after work hours & conducted by industry veterans with a practical "from-the-trenches" approach. BigDataCloud meetup attendees have heard & met the instructors individually: Paul Baclace - presented "Optimizing bursty Hadoop analysis demands for big data using A ...

Facebook engineers have tested a 64-core specialty chip from Tilera and found it more efficient for grabbing data quickly from key value stores. This test and others performed across the industry on alternatives to x86 chips may galvanize the creation of new benchmarks for the server industry as the debate of which architecture works best for webscale and cloud computing rages. The paper, issued Monday, and ...

Today Microsoft Research announced the availability of a free technology preview of Project Daytona MapReduce Runtime for Windows Azure. Using a set of tools for working with big data based on Google's MapReduce paper, it provides an alternative to Apache Hadoop. Daytona was created by the eXtreme Computing Group at Microsoft Research. It's designed to help scientists take advantage of Azure for working wit ...

Last week was definitely a busy one in the MapReduce world! At the annual Hadoop Summit, Yahoo! officially announced the spinoff of HortonWorks (possibly the worst kept secret in the Hadoop community), and Cloudera and MapR both announced new distributions. With even more fragmentation coming to the Hadoop community, what better time to wrap up this series on the state of MapReduce. In my previous two posts ...

Informatica is joining the growing ranks of vendors moving to support Hadoop, the open-source framework for large-scale or "big data" processing, the company announced Monday. The 9.1 version of Informatica's platform features a connector to the Hadoop file system (HDFS), allowing customers to move data in and out of Hadoop clusters. While the Hadoop project has its roots in Web companies, having been led b ...

Big data startup MapR is now an official corporate contributor to the Apache Hadoop project, a somewhat interesting turn of affairs given its corporate mission to lure users away from Apache’s Hadoop Distributed File System. Although this might seem like an odd partnership — even more so now after EMC announced MapR as the storage foundation for its Apache Hadoop alternative — it demonstrates the type of co ...