When customers look to deploy their Hadoop solutions, one of the first questions they ask is, which distro should we run it on? For many enterprise customers, the answer has been MapR. For those of you not familiar with MapR, they offer an enterprise-grade Hadoop software solution that provides customers with a robust set of tools for running Big Data workloads. A few months ago, Cisco announced the release of Tidal Enterprise Scheduler (TES) 6.1 and with it integrations for Hadoop software distributions, such as Cloudera and MapR, as well as adapters to support Sqoop, Data Mover (HDFS), Hive, and MapReduce jobs. All performed through the same TES interface as their other enterprise workloads.

Today, I’m pleased to announce that with the upcoming 6.1.1 release of Cisco’s Tidal Enterprise Scheduler, Cisco’s MapR integration will deepen further. Leveraging Big Data for competitive advantage and rises in innovative product offerings are changing the storage, management, and analysis of an enterprise’s most critical asset -- data. The difficulty of managing Hadoop clusters will continue to grow and enterprises need solutions like Hadoop to enable the processing of large amounts of data. Cisco Tidal Enterprise Scheduler enables more efficient management of those environment because it is an intelligent solution for integrating Big Data jobs into an existing data center infrastructure. TES has adapters for a range of enterprise applications including: SAP, Informatica, Oracle, PeopleSoft, MSSQL, JDEdwards, and many others.

Stay tuned for additional blog posts on Cisco’s Tidal Enterprise Scheduler version 6.

Tags: Big Data, Cloudera, enterprise scheduler, Hadoop, MapR, mapreduce, sqoop, tes, Tidal

Updated: 03/01/2013

You may have heard that the digital universe is in petabytes, global IP traffic is in 100s of exabytes. These are mind bogglingly large metrics. Big data analytics can play a crucial role in making datasets in this space usable – by improving operational efficiency to customer experience to prediction accuracy. While Cisco is the global leader in networking -- Did you know that 85% of estimated 500 exabyte global IP traffic in 2012 will pass through Cisco devices ? – the company also builds an innovative family of unified computing products. This enables the company to provide a complete infrastructure solution including compute, storage, connectivity and unified management for big data applications that reduce complexity, improves agility, and radically improves cost of ownership.

To meet a variety of big data platform demands (Hadoop, NoSQL Databases, Massively Parallel Processing Databases etc), Cisco offers a comprehensive solution stack: the Common Platform Architecture (CPA) for Big Data includes compute, storage, connectivity and unified management. Unique to this architecture is the seamless data integration and management integration capabilities with enterprise application ecosystem including Oracle RDBMS/RAC, Microsoft SQL Server, SAP and others. See Figure 1. 

Figure 1:

The CPA is built using the following components:

• Cisco UCS 6200 Series Fabric Interconnects provides high speed, low latency connectivity for servers and centralized management for all connected devices with UCS Manager. Deployed in redundant pairs offers the full redundancy, performance (active-active), and exceptional scalability for large number of nodes typical in big data clusters. UCS Manger enables rapid and consistent server integration using service profile, ongoing system maintenance activities such as firmware update operations across the entire cluster as a single operation, advanced monitoring, and option to raise alarms and send notifications about the health of the entire cluster.
• Cisco UCS 2200 Series Fabric Extenders, act as remote line cards for Fabric Interconnects providing a highly scalable and extremely cost-effective connectivity for large number of nodes.
• Cisco UCS C240 M3 Rack-Mount Servers, 2-RU server designed for wide range of compute, IO and storage capacity demands. Powered by two Intel Xeon E5-2600 series processors and support up to 768 GB of main memory (typically 128GB or 256GB for big data applications) and up to 24 SFF disk drives in the performance optimized option or 12 LFF disk drives in the capacity optimized option. Also features Cisco UCS VNIC optimized for high bandwidth and low latency cluster connectivity with support for up to 256 virtual devices.
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Tags: Big Data, Cloudera, Common Platform Architecture, CPA, Greenplum MR, Hadoop, MapR, MarkLogic, MPP Database, NoSQL, Oracle NoSQL Database, ParAccel

Expanding its Big Data portfolio, Cisco announced a fully integrated end-to-end hardware and software infrastructure for enterprise Hadoop deployments in partnership with Greenplum, a division of EMC, that delivers industry-leading performance, scalability, advanced management capabilities and enterprise-class service and support. This solution consists of Cisco UCS 6200 Series Fabric Interconnects, Cisco UCS C-Series rack mount servers and Greenplum MR. Greeplum MR is based on the MapR M5 distribution, a completely re-engineered implementation of the Apache Hadoop stack with 100 percent compatibility. Cisco UCS is the exclusive integrated platform for Greeplum MR that can significantly reduce time-to-value and the operating expenses associated with Hadoop implementations.

Hadoop implementations can present a number of challenges to enterprise environments, many of these arise from the dichotomy between the introduction of innovative new technology and the enterprise-class performance, reliability, and support demanded by mission-critical systems. The collaboration between Cisco and Greenplum is specifically designed to provide a solution to these challenges. The joint solution delivers radically simplified deployment and management, high availability, excellent performance, exceptional scalability, and world-class service and support from long-time collaborators Cisco and EMC.

This solution can also connect, across the same management plane, to other Cisco UCS deployments running enterprise applications, thereby radically simplifying data center management and connectivity.

The configuration starts in a single rack with the ability to extend into multiple racks.

For more information or deal inquiries, please email us at: gponucs@external.cisco.com. A joint white paper is available at http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns340/ns517/ns224/ns944/wp_greenplum.pdf.

Tags: Big Data, Greenplum MR, Hadoop, MapR