I’m gonna knock you out! Mama said knock you out! I’m gonna knock you out! blared over the speakers as Isilon entered the building at EMC World to capture the Enterprise HDFS Storage World Championship title belt. The ring announcer’s introduction went like this, “From Seattle, Washington, weighing in at over 150 petabytes of HDFS storage capacity sold to date, Iiiisssilllonnn. Let’s get ready to rumble!”
In the first round Isilon came out swinging with a total of 6 Hadoop breakout sessions attended by well over 1,000 people in total. The breakout session punches ranged from Hadoop with Isilon introduction jabs to deep technical uppercut presentations. Check out a Hadoop session in progress below!
The next couple of rounds Isilon toyed with its opponent in the Expo Hall, by having our Big Data Analytic partners speak about our joint solutions in the Isilon booth theater, our Hands on Lab showing how to easily deploy Hadoop with Isilon with our step-by-step Hadoop Starter Kit (HSK) instructions (download here), and our presence in the EMC Federation booth demo featuring a Big Data use case and architecture with Isilon.
The knockout punch came fast and sudden in the 4th round. As part of Isilon President, Bill Richter’s keynote, he included a thought leadership panel on stage with two of our most strategic ‘corner men’ partners. The panel included, Paul Maritz, CEO of Pivotal, and Tom Reilly, CEO of Cloudera. Two recognized leaders in this space. They discussed Big Data trends and their perspectives of when and how Hadoop will REDEFINE how Enterprises approach their data and the valuable insights it will provide the organization. It was then the opponent’s knees buckled and a loud thump was heard as it hit the canvas. “7, 8, 9, 10,” was heard and then the match ended.
The arena erupted with cheers as the ring announcer raised Isilon’s right arm and told the crowd of thousands, “And, the winner by knockout. The still undisputed Enterprise HDFS Storage Champion of the World, Isilon!”
On a related note, a mass gathering of people congregated outside the arena. Many had shirts and signs reading, “Free Hadoop” with an image of a yellow cartoon elephant behind jail bars (see below). We can’t confirm, but it looked to be some type of movement. A “Free Hadoop” movement?
More on this breaking news next time!