A new customer technical case study on Skyscape’s use of vSphere as their platform for deploying Hadoop in the cloud was published recently. Skyscape, based in the UK, deploys Hadoop clusters on demand for their UK Government customers from the company’s public cloud infrastructure. Citizen services data and analysis tools are provided by these government departments that leverage Hadoop for data gathering and analysis.
The newly provisioned Hadoop clusters are based on the Hortonworks HDP platform today, but plans are in the works for providing other Hadoop distributions also in the future. The Skyscape engineers really innovated in an impressive way on the Big Data Extensions (BDE) platform. The system not only provides the end user with a Hadoop cluster capability but also with an Ambari Server of their own to manage and monitor their Hadoop cluster. This is all done on X86 hardware servers with direct-attached storage. Skyscape also made use of the BDE REST APIs to achieve their goal. They had five separate end-user customer groups signed up for use shortly after releasing the Hadoop service to their community.
Two other very interesting and useful blogs on virtualization of big data appeared recently: one on Using Big Data Extensions 2.2 written by Julie Roman, a Technical Account Manager at VMware who has worked on big data projects and another (from LinkedIn) on Big Data as a Service by George Trujillo, who is a VP at a Financial Services company. Both of these are very useful reads on their respective areas!
