Dell EMC Can Help You Dive In to Successful Hadoop Projects

As Strata + Hadoop World kicks off in San Jose this week, the Dell EMC team will be there in full force. In addition to our long history supporting Cloudera Hadoop with Dell EMC solutions, we’re also broadening our support with a new, open-standards based Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Hortonworks Hadoop offering.

There is clearly growing interest in this area, but during my five years managing Hadoop products for Dell EMC, I frequently hear prospective customers say, “I understand the value of Hadoop, but I don’t know where to start.” They know Hadoop is an innovative technology that offers unique opportunities as a foundation for capitalizing on the untapped values of big data; however, customers say that one or more of the following blockers are getting in the way of a successful project launch:

  • We don’t have the skill set in my organization to pull it off
  • We’ve spent a lot of time and effort on the front-end work and don’t have much to show for it
  • We’re not sure what else we are going to need beside HDFS and MapReduce

Organizations trying to meet deadlines while struggling to answer questions and make decisions will often times fall behind schedule and lose the confidence of key partner teams. There is ample data to suggest that what I am hearing is impacting the market in general.  Consider some of these facts:

  • Gartner notes that, through 2018, 70 percent of Hadoop deployments will fail to meet cost savings and revenue generation objectives due to skills and integration challenges.
  • According to IDC, shortage of skilled staff will extend from data scientists to architects and experts in data management. Unfulfilled end-user expectations will further sour the already tense relationship between business and IT. Having the right data architecture and preparation skills will go a long way in ensuring the fulfillment of end-user expectations.
  • And The Big Data Market research notes that “overall, we found only 2,680 companies that are using Hadoop at any level of maturity.”

The good news is that there are also plenty of success stories, and the potential of big data analytics is too great to pass up. The Internet of Everything is transforming the way every business operates. It is ruthlessly re-defining industries, re-drawing the lines of competition and re-inventing our future. This digital transformation will cause disruption, and business leaders must be prepared to act on the opportunities created.

Our message to customers is:

Dell EMC can help you remove all of the barriers to implementing Hadoop. You don’t have to go at it alone. Utilize our expertise and validation process to reduce the risk.

Having both infrastructure and Hadoop ecosystem expertise available from a single vendor is indispensable when building or expanding a big data environment. Dell EMC, in partnership with Cloudera and Hortonworks, help organizations bridge the skills gap by providing expert guidance and sharing leave behind resources to streamline the architecture, design, planning and configuration of Hadoop environments.

This expert guidance and knowledge is available today with updates to Dell EMC Hadoop solutions, the Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Cloudera Hadoop, new Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Hortonworks Hadoop and Dell EMC Analytic Insights Module offerings.

Customers can leverage our Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Cloudera Hadoop or Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Hortonworks Hadoop to enable data-driven insights and decision making quickly and with low start-up risk. We eliminate the impact of the skills gap through a combination of pre-configured and pre-tested infrastructure with people trained in all of the latest Hadoop technology.

While our Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Hortonworks Hadoop is new and available this May, we also have updated our Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Cloudera Hadoop with Cloudera CDH 5.10 software. Both Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) 2.6 and Cloudera CDH 5.10 software release packages are available via Dell Digital Download (DDL) for automatic download, along with a Deployment Tool Kit for simplified deployment.

Our portfolio also includes Dell EMC Analytic Insights Module, a fully-engineered offer, which combines self-service data analytics with cloud-native application development into a single cloud platform with the option to use either Hortonworks or Cloudera distributions. According to a recent ESG Lab technology review, Analytic Insights Module could reduce the time it takes businesses to implement a robust data analytics solution by 47 percent over building it themselves. In addition, Analytic Insights Module helps organizations reach insights faster by reducing the ingest and transform portions of the ETL by 96 percent.

Why do we offer both Cloudera and Hortonworks? The request has come directly from customers, who have shown interest in both. Hortonworks is committed to growing the Hadoop ecosystem by keeping the Big Data framework 100 percent open source. While Cloudera Hadoop is based on the open source Apache Hadoop distribution, Cloudera Enterprise’s management console (Cloudera Management Suite) requires a software license.

When it comes to Hadoop solutions, why work with Dell EMC?

  • Expertise has been built over years of experience
  • Demonstrated repeatable success
  • First Tier 1 vendor to support Hadoop architecture, starting in 2011
  • Seven server platforms validated for Hadoop
  • Twenty Hadoop architectures validated
  • Most robust Big Data portfolio in the market – Cloudera, Hortonworks, Splunk, MongoDB, Pivotal, Consulting Services, and Analytics Insight Module

Our investments and commitment have resulted in solutions that allow your organization to build a Hadoop cluster without guesswork. You can leverage Dell EMC technology solutions to streamline the entire process from bare-metal server configuration to network setup to running Cloudera CDH 5.10 or Hortonworks HDP 2.6 on a certified architecture. Dell EMC delivers an architecture document that provides the guidance you need to build a Hadoop direct-attached-storage (DAS) cluster from bare metal hardware. With the expertise and experience of Dell EMC to take you through the steps, you can break through the skills gap, saving valuable time and resources, so you can accelerate time to value.

If you’re at Strata + Hadoop World this week, check out a class session today (Tuesday) from 1:30pm–5:00pm (Room 210 B/F) on “Determining the Economic Value of Your Data” with Dell EMC’s Bill Schmarzo, the “Dean of Big Data.” And please come by our booth to learn how Dell EMC can help you with Hadoop or any of your big data needs. We’ll have sessions delivered throughout Wednesday and Thursday with experts from Dell and our partners: Cloudera, Hortonworks, Intel and VMware. I looking forward to speaking with you!

About the Author: Armando Acosta

Armando Acosta has been involved in the IT Industry over the last 15 years with experience in architecting IT solutions and product-marketing, management, planning, and strategy. Armando’s latest role has been focused on Big Data|Hadoop solutions, addressing solutions that build new capabilities for emerging customer needs, and assists with the roadmap for new products and features. Armando is a graduate of University of Texas at Austin and resides in Austin, TX.