Year: 2014

May 12, 2014 Leave a Comment
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Hortonworks Data Platform with Cisco UCS; and a note on incredible performance of Hive 13

Undoubtedly Big Data is becoming an integral part of enterprise IT ecosystem across major industry verticals, and Apache Hadoop is emerging almost synonymous with it as the as the foundation of the next generation data management platform. Sometimes referred to as Data Lake this platform serves as the primary landing zone for data from across a wide variety of data sources. Traditional and several new application software vendors have been building the plumbing – in software terms data connectors and data movers – to extract data from it for further processing. New to Apache Hadoop is YARN which is pretty much an operating system for Big Data enabling multiple workloads – batch, interactive, streaming, and real-time – all coexisting on a cluster.

The Hortonworks Data Platform combines the most useful and stable versions of Apache Hadoop and its related projects into a single tested and certified package. Cisco has been partnering with HortonWorks to provide an industry leading platform for enterprise Hadoop deployments. The Cisco UCS solution for Hortonworks Data Platform is based on the Cisco UCS Common Platform Architecture Version 2 for Big Data – a popular platform for Data Lakes widely adopted across major industry verticals, featuring single connect, unified management, advanced monitoring capabilities, seamless management integration and data integration (plumbing) capabilities with other enterprise application systems based on Oracle, Microsoft, SAS, SAP and others.

We are excited to see several joint wins with Hortonworks in the service provider, insurance, retail, healthcare and other sectors. The joint solution is available in three reference architectures, Performance-Capacity Balanced, Capacity Optimized and Capacity Optimized with Flash – all support up to 10 racks at 16 servers each without additional switches. Scaling beyond 10 racks (160 servers) can be implemented by interconnecting domains using Cisco Nexus 6000/7000/9000 series switches, scalable to thousands of servers and to hundreds of petabytes storage, and managed from a single pane using the Cisco UCS Central.

New to this partnership is Hortonworks Data Platform 2.1 which includes Apache Hive 13  which significantly faster than previous generation Hive 12. We have jointly conducted extensive performance benchmarking using 20 queries derived from TPC-DS Benchmark  – an industry standard benchmark for Decision Support Systems from the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC). The tests were conducted on a 16 node Cisco UCS CPA v2 Performance-Capacity Balanced cluster using a 30TB dataset. We have observed about 300% performance acceleration for some queries with Hive 13 compared to Hive 12. See Figure 1.

Additional performance are improvements expected with the GA release. What does this mean? (i) First of all, Hive brings SQL like abilities – SQL being the most common and expressive language for analytics – to petabyte scale datasets – in an economical manner  (ii) Hadoop becomes friendlier for SQL developers and SQL based business analytics platforms (iii) Such performance improvements (from Hive 12 to 13) makes migrations from proprietary systems to Hadoop even more compelling. More coming. Stay tuned !

Figure 1:Hive 13 vs. Hive 12

hdpHDP hive13

Disclaimer: The queries listed here is derived from the TPC-DS Benchmark. These results cannot be compared with TPC-DS Benchmark results. For more information visit www.tpc.org.



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Raghunath Nambiar

No Longer with Cisco

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Mobile Retail Evolution and Location Based Services

retaillbs1

This is part of a series of how location services is a core part of the mobile evolution in various industries. In a previous post I looked at the growth of mobile  location, data and context based advertising, and there is no doubt from the evidence that this market space is already big, and predicted to grow exponentially over the next 4 or 5 years.

While this is very interesting at a macro level, for most of us what does that really mean, what can it be used for, how can we get some value or benefits from it….

Let’s look at this from the point of view of various industries, both looking at the uses of the consumer and of the business in a practical manner.

Today we look at the Retail Industry, and ask a few questions to understand the landscape.

  • How are consumers habits changing
  • What are retailers doing about this
  • What can we expect to see in the coming year(s)?

How are consumer habits changing?

We already know that today over two-thirds of all U.S. consumers have a smartphone (expected to be >90% in about 3 years) and the capabilities that this brings is changing the face of retail business as we know it. Specifically looking at mobile retail and advertising the patterns are undeniable, we as mobile retail consumers are doing things differently and happy to engage and be engaged in new ways.

◦    Remember the coupon cutting days…well mobile coupons are starting to become the norm…recent research among mobile users shows significant numbers redeemed mobile coupons… 41% at grocery stores, 41% at department stores, and 39% @ clothing stores (source: Business Insider 2014) Continue reading “Mobile Retail Evolution and Location Based Services”



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Brendan O'Brien

Director Global Product Marketing

Connected Mobile Experiences

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Yvette Kanouff Joins Cisco to lead Service Provider Video Software and Solutions Organization

I am extremely pleased to announce Yvette Kanouff is joining Cisco to become leader of our service provider Video Software and Solutions (SPVSS) organization, the home of Cisco’s Videoscape software and solutions for pay-TV service providers and media and entertainment companies.

Yvette is joining Cisco from Cablevision Systems where she was most recently executive vice president of corporate engineering and technology, responsible for the implementation of strategic technology and critical engineering priorities; identifying emerging technology opportunities and driving the development and integration of new products.

Yvette is a terrific leader and I’m thrilled she’s joining our team. As many of you in the industry will know, she was recently recognized with an auspicious 2014 Vanguard Award for Leadership in Science and Technology by the National Cable Telecommunications Association

Prior to joining Cablevision, Yvette served as President of SeaChange where she led their transition from a hardware company to a software company, helping to move the industry towards web centric, open standards-based solutions and architectures. While with SeaChange, she won an Emmy for the company’s work on video-on-demand. Previously, Yvette also served as Time Warner Cable’s Director of Interactive Technologies. She holds several patents on VOD-related digital technologies.

I’m sure you, our customers and business partners, will be looking forward to meeting Yvette once she joins us June 16th. In the interim, she asked me to pass on this message from her:

“I’m thrilled to be joining Cisco at such an exciting time for our industry. Cisco is playing the most crucial role it ever has in helping service providers deliver new experiences, new consumption models, and to compete with myriad new entertainment and service options. During my time at Cablevision we made tremendous progress on key technological advancements that enabled us to provide significant value to our customers and move the industry forward. I believe Cisco also has the people, the technology and culture to help our customers win. I’m looking forward to joining the team!”

As the leader of SPVSS, Yvette will have responsibility for a business that spans end-to-end Videoscape software and solutions, including content protection, cloud video services and delivery, and end-user multiscreen experiences.

Welcome to Cisco, Yvette!



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Pankaj Patel

Executive Vice President and Chief Development Officer

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Mining Copper Ore — and Digital Insights — in the Internet of Everything Economy

The Internet of Everything (IoE) is a juggernaut of change, transforming organizations in profound ways. It sows disruption, and it grants enormous opportunities. But this sweeping wave of change is not reserved for what we normally think of as “technology companies.” In the IoE economy, even seemingly “analog” endeavors must be bestowed with network connectivity, no matter how venerable a company’s roots or old its traditions.

In a world where Everyone Is a Tech Company, there are some great examples of older companies that are heeding this new reality. Retail, manufacturing, transportation, and education are just a few of the places where people, process, data, and things are being connected in startling new ways. Companies that are ahead of the IoE transformation curve will ensure their competiveness in marketplaces that are ever more vulnerable to disruption.

Dundee Precious Metals provides a great example of a company that is embracing change. A far-flung global organization, the company, for example, runs Europe’s largest mine in Chelopech, Bulgaria, from which it ships gold-rich copper ore to a smelter in Namibia. Yet through IoE-related technologies, executives at the company’s headquarters in Toronto, Canada, have gained unprecedented visibility into all aspects of their operations.

The end result? A boon in safety, efficiency, and productivity.

Continue reading “Mining Copper Ore — and Digital Insights — in the Internet of Everything Economy”



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Joseph M. Bradley

Global Vice President

Digital & IoT Advanced Services

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Cisco Introduces Elastic Access

With operational costs rising at a rate of 13% a year, carriers need to simplify their networks while leveraging virtualization and automation technologies to reduce the costs involved in bringing on new customers. What’s more, as bandwidth demands increase for video, mobile, and cloud services, network access can’t be a bottleneck for the customer experience.

At Cisco, we’ve now announced new Carrier Ethernet innovations that will extend Cisco’s Evolved Programmable Network capabilities to the access with specific focus on automating the provisioning process and reducing operational costs for our carrier customers.

First of all, with virtualization technology we’re bringing elasticity to access networks.  By leveraging Continue reading “Cisco Introduces Elastic Access”



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Greg Smith

Sr. Manager, Marketing

Cisco Solutions Marketing

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OpenStack and Cisco – IceHouse release and Juno Summit

Cisco is committed to further OpenStack development and in this post I’m going to provide an update on contributions made by the Cisco team members in the latest OpenStack release and what sessions are lead by them in the upcoming Juno Design Summit.

The ninth OpenStack software release- IceHouse, came out April 17th and boasts several new features and bug fixes across all OpenStack projects. As OpenStack adoption and developer community continues to grow, the evolving software maturity and stability makes it easier for administrators to deploy and application developers to integrate with OpenStack services.

Cisco’s contribution in the OpenStack IceHouse release has been across different projects as well. Statistics (from Stackalytics) on the number of lines committed module wise in the IceHouse release by the Cisco team members are shown below.

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loc1

 

Keeping with OpenStack’s open design and development process, Cisco’s OpenStack team  worked with the community in different ways to achieve the project release goals.  Highlights of some IceHouse Design Summit (Hong Kong, November 2013) commitments that the Cisco team delivered as part of the IceHouse release include –

  • Neutron Modular Layer 2 (ML2) OpenDayLight Mechanism Driver
  • Neutron Advanced Service VPN Cisco CSR1Kv Driver
  • Cisco Nexus1000 vswitch plugin improvements in OpenStack Neutron and Horizon
  • Tempest testing for the continuous integration of the Neutron Cisco Nexus plugin
  • Enhancement of puppet modules for deploying OpenStack services
  • Increased capabilities in OpenStack Heat for working with OpenStack Neutron and OpenShift Origin (Demo here)
  • Nova REST API for server/instance groups allowing grouping of resources

The  OpenStack Juno Design Summit is starting this week in Atlanta. In addition to the general speaking sessions, booth, demos and other events captured here, the Cisco’s team members are also leading and participating in several design sessions to shape the Juno OpenStack release. Below is the list of sessions that have Cisco team members as one of the speakers –

Cisco also recently released Ubuntu OpenStack Havana based Cisco Validated Design (CVD) using Cisco UCS and Nexus. Here is a link to the document. Additionally, a customer case study on how OpenStack on Cisco infrastructure can help to scale with aggressive growth strategy for an image hosting service has been made publicly available.

We look forward to having some great discussions at the Summit and hope to see you there as well! You can also visit us at Cisco’s OpenStack webpage for more information.



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Rohit Agarwalla

Software Engineer

Office of Cloud CTO

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How Data Virtualization Helps Data Scientists

By now it is clear that big data analytics opens the door to unprecedented analytic opportunities for business innovation, customer retention and profit growth. However, a shortage of data scientists is creating a bottleneck as organizations move from early big data experiments into larger scale adoption. This constraint limits big data analytics and the positive business outcomes that could be achieved.

Jason Hull
Click on the photo to hear from Comcast’s Jason Hull, Data Integration Specialist about how his team uses data virtualization to get what they need done, faster

It’s All About the Data

As every data scientist will tell you, the key to analytics is data. The more data the better, including big data as well as the myriad other data sources both in the enterprise and across the cloud. But accessing and massaging this data, in advance of data modeling and statistical analysis, typically consumes 50% or more of any new analytic development effort.

• What would happen if we could simplify the data aspect of the work?
• Would that free up data scientists to spend more time on analysis?
• Would it open the door for non-data scientists to contribute to analytic projects?

SQL is the key. Because of its ease and power, it has been the predominant method for accessing and massaging data for the past 30 years. Nearly all non-data scientists in IT can use SQL to access and massage data, but very few know MapReduce, the traditional language used to access data from Hadoop sources.

How Data Virtualization Helps

“We have a multitude of users…from BI to operational reporting, they are constantly coming to us requesting access to one server or another…we now have that one central place to say ‘you already have access to it’ and they immediately have access rather than having to grant access outside of the tool” -Jason Hull, Comcast

Data virtualization offerings, like Cisco’s, can help organizations bridge this gap and accelerate their big data analytics efforts. Cisco was the first data virtualization vendor to support Hadoop integration with its June 2011 release. This standardized SQL approach augments specialized MapReduce coding of Hadoop queries. By simplifying access to Hadoop data, organizations could for the first time use SQL to include big data sources, as well as enterprise, cloud and other data sources, in their analytics.

In February 2012, Cisco became the first data virtualization vendor to enable MapReduce programs to easily query virtualized data sources, on-demand with high performance. This allowed enterprises to extend MapReduce analyses beyond Hadoop stores to include diverse enterprise data previously integrated by the Cisco Information Server.

In 2013, Cisco maintained its big data integration leadership with updates of its support for Hive access to the leading Hadoop distributions including Apache Hadoop, Cloudera Distribution (CDH) and Hortonworks (HDP). In addition, Cisco now also supports access to Hadoop through HiveServer2 and Cloudera CDH through Impala.

Others, beyond Cisco, recognize this beneficial trend. In fact, Rick van der Lans, noted Data Virtualization expert and author, recently blogged on future developments in this area in Convergence of Data Virtualization and SQL-on-Hadoop Engines.

So if your organization’s big data efforts are slowed by a shortage of data scientists, consider data virtualization as a way to break the bottleneck.



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Bob Eve

No Longer with Cisco

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ANGA 2014: Igniting Growth for Service Providers

mckeownBy Mike McKeown – Director of Business Development for Service Provider Video at Cisco, EMEAR

It may be a month of bank holidays in Europe, but there’s no standing still for the video industry in May. We’re proud to say that it started with an announcement from Synergy Research (at the end of April) that we are the leading provider of video technology solutions to the industry.

How, you might ask, do you follow that?

With two of the industry’s most prominent events – firstly NCTA’s the Cable Show in LA and now ANGACOM in Cologne.

As with every year, NCTA provided a platform for the US cable industry to demonstrate and discuss the latest trends affecting some of the world’s largest cable operators.

On May 20th through 22nd, we’ll undoubtedly be having similar discussions at ANGACOM, but with a specific focus on Continue reading “ANGA 2014: Igniting Growth for Service Providers”



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David Yates

as Director of Service Provider Video Marketing at Cisco

SP360

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IoE Takes to the Highway (and not how you think!) to Transform Marketing

You’ve heard us talk a lot about the major value at stake – or increased revenue and reduced business costs – around the Internet of Everything (IoE) for the public sector and various industries including retail, healthcare and manufacturing. But what about the one nearest and dearest to my heart — the marketing and advertising industry?

Cisco has identified a $1.95T value at stake for advertising and marketing organizations that harness the potential of the IoE.  Companies will realize this value by becoming more connected with their customers and delivering individually targeted messages and offers to them on any device, at any time and at any location.

And today Cisco is becoming more connected with its customers and showcasing IoE in a way we never have before by launching our first ever billboard…connected to the Internet.

Cisco’s connected billboard responds to real time traffic by displaying content that changes based on traffic conditions.  When the freeway is wide open – think evenings and weekends – the billboard will deliver a short message about the Internet of Everything.  As traffic slows – think commute hours – the billboard will reveal that it is responding to real time traffic, and drivers will receive a longer message depending on how slow they are going.

The billboard – located on highway 101 just south of Whipple Avenue in Redwood City, CA – replaces one that was digital, but had no interactive capabilities.  With Cisco’s help and access to road sensor API traffic data, this billboard has woken up and joined the Internet of Everything.

This new billboard is truly an example of “connecting the previously unconnected” and it’s one that will disrupt the advertising space and help brands respond to and tailor marketing messages to audiences in real time.

If something as simple as a highway billboard can be reinvented through simply connecting it to the Internet, imagine what else is possible with the Internet of Everything.

ConnectedBillboard copy

 



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Blair Christie

Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer