Oracle: Big Data Appliance X3-2

Oracle Corp. announced new releases of Oracle Big Data Appliance and Oracle Big Data Connectors.

              Oracle Big Data Appliance

Big Data Appliance X3-2 is a cost-effective, engineered system of hardware and software that has been upgraded to include Intel’s new processors and the latest release of Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH) and Cloudera Manager, as well as the new Oracle Enterprise Manager plug-in for Big Data Appliance.

Oracle Big Data Connectors have been enhanced to enable greater SQL access to Hadoop from Oracle Database and to enable more transparent access to Hadoop from R.

When used in conjunction with Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalytics, Oracle Big Data Appliance with Oracle Big Data Connectors provides a full set of engineered systems to acquire, organize, and analyze big data. The latest releases provide more processing power, memory capacity, enhanced integration and management capabilities.

Recently, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Funded Frederick National Library won the 2012 Government Big Data Solution Award for its work using the Big Data Appliance with the Cloudera Distribution of Apache Hadoop (CDH) to build an infrastructure capable of cross-referencing the relationships between 17,000 genes and five major cancer subtypes across 20 million biomedical publication abstracts.

Engineered System Simplifies Big Data for the Enterprise
Big Data Appliance X3-2 hardware features the 8-core Intel Xeon E5-2600 series of processors, and compared with previous generation, the 18 compute and storage servers with 648TB raw storage now offer:

• 33% more processing power with 288 CPU cores;
• 33% more memory per node with 1.1TB of main memory; and
• up to a 30% reduction in power and cooling

Big Data Appliance X3-2 further simplifies implementation and management of big data by integrating all the hardware and software required to acquire, organize and analyze big data.

It includes:

• Support for CDH4.1 including software upgrades developed collaboratively with Cloudera to simplify NameNode High Availability in Hadoop, eliminating the single point of failure in a Hadoop cluster;
• Oracle NoSQL Database Community Edition 2.0, the latest version that brings better Hadoop integration, elastic scaling and new APIs, including JSON and C support;
• The Oracle Enterprise Manager plug-in for Big Data Appliance that complements Cloudera Manager to enable users to more easily manage a Hadoop cluster;
• Updated distributions of Oracle Linux and Oracle Java Development Kit;
• An updated distribution of open source R, optimized to work with high performance multi-threaded math libraries Connectors Integrate Hadoop with Oracle Big Data Ecosystem Oracle Big Data Connectors is a suite of software built by Oracle to integrate Apache Hadoop with Oracle Database, Oracle Data Integrator, and Oracle R Distribution.

Enhancements to Oracle Big Data Connectors extend these data integration capabilities.

With updates to every connector, this release includes:

• Oracle SQL Connector for Hadoop Distributed File System, for high performance SQL queries on Hadoop data from Oracle Database, enhanced with increased automation and querying of Hive tables and now supported within the Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop;
• Transparent access to the Hive Query language from R and introduction of new analytic techniques executing natively in Hadoop, enabling R developers to be more productive by increasing access to Hadoop in the R environment.

"An influx of raw datasets is flooding every enterprise. However, before businesses can take advantage of the potential opportunity, they face a significant challenge in organizing these diverse data sources," said Cetin Ozbutun, VP, Data Warehousing and Big Data Technologies, Oracle. "The latest updates further improve the abilities of our customers to optimize big data workloads and integrate them with their data warehouses to easily analyze all data throughout the enterprise."

"Organizations are increasingly looking for mature, reliable enterprise-ready tools to support their big data initiatives," said Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera. "Optimized for Hadoop, Oracle Big Data Appliance with Cloudera delivers an easy-to-manage Hadoop platform, designed to meet the Big Data needs of today’s enterprise."