The Oracle Big Data Appliance, an engineered system of hardware and software that was first unveiled at Oracle OpenWorld in October, is now generally available. The new system incorporates Cloudera's Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (CDH3) with Cloudera Manager 3.7, plus an open source distribution of R.
Running on Oracle Linux, the system also features Oracle NoSQL Database Community Edition, a distributed key-value database designed to manage massive amounts of data, and Oracle Java HotSpot Virtual Machine.
The Oracle Big Data Appliance represents "two industry leaders coming together to wrap their arms around all things big data," says Cloudera COO Kirk Dunn. "When you think about the way that the big data market gets described, often there are discrete lines drawn between databases, data warehouses, and Hadoop." However, Dunn notes, "We believe that the right way to think about it is the workloads and the users across those segments because when you think of it that way, you actually see the lines blur, and this is why the relationship with Oracle is so significant."
The Big Data Appliance, which has been optimized for running Hadoop and for running Oracle’s NoSQL Database will, in Oracle’s view, most commonly be used in enterprises in conjunction with the existing infrastructure that enterprises already have in place, particularly around analytics and information management, observes George Lumpkin, Oracle’s vice president of product management, Data Warehousing. The Big Data Appliance will be used in conjunction with Oracle Exadata, for example, a platform that a customer might be using for their data warehouse, and Oracle Exalytics, a platform for business intelligence. "That was the vision and strategy that we laid out at Oracle OpenWorld," says Lumpkin. "With this announcement, we feel that we have introduced products into the big data space at a very appropriate time for the market."
Oracle is also rolling out Oracle Big Data Connectors, a software product intended to help customers easily integrate data stored in Hadoop and Oracle NoSQL Database with Oracle Database 11g. Together with Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, Oracle says the Oracle Big Data Appliance with the Oracle Big Data Connectors software will deliver everything customers require to acquire, organize and to analyze big data within the context of all their enterprise data.
The Big Data Connectors are also being sold separately, says Lumpkin. "An enterprise that has built its own Hadoop cluster can buy the Big Data Connectors and integrate Hadoop with its own Oracle Database without necessarily using the Oracle Big Data Appliance."
The Oracle Big Data Appliance comes in a full rack configuration of 18 Oracle Sun servers with a total of 864 GB main memory; 216 CPU cores; 648 TB of raw disk storage; 40 Gb/s InfiniBand connectivity between nodes and other Oracle engineered systems; and, 10 Gb/s Ethernet data center connectivity. This new engineered system scales by connecting multiple racks together via an InfiniBand network enabling it to acquire, organize and analyze extreme data volumes.
The new offering, says Dunn, is creating "a real opportunity for customers to do things with this partnership that have never been able to be done before. It also gives Oracle and Cloudera a unique perspective on what other kinds of workloads and users are going to come out of this environment."
More information is available about the Oracle Big Data Appliance at www.oracle.com.
More information is available about Cloudera.