by Angela Guess
Jaikumr Vijayan reports, “The shipping of Oracle’s Big Data Appliance earlier this month could pressure major rivals like IBM, Hewlett-Packard and SAP to come up with Hadoop offerings that tightly bundle hardware, software and other tools, analysts say. On the day the appliance shipped, Oracle announced that its new offering will run Cloudera’s Apache Hadoop implementation and management software. The tightly bundled Big Data Appliance includes Sun server hardware — 18 Linux-based x86 Sun servers with 216 processor cores, 864GB of working memory and 648TB of raw disk storage — along with an Oracle NoSQL database, an open-source distribution of R statistical software and a copy of Oracle’s Java HotSpot Virtual Machine.”
He continues, “David Menninger, an analyst with Ventana Research, said the offering will likely prompt IT managers to look more closely at bundled systems that could be ‘one-stop shops’ for corporate data needs. The Oracle system is designed to manage and analyze data sets, such as telemetry data, click-stream data or other log data, that are too large or are otherwise unsuitable for keeping in databases, Menninger said. James Kobielus, an analyst at Forrester Research, said if IT managers do in fact take to the bundled Hadoop system, the other top tech vendors, many of which have already spent considerable sums on big data research and development, could be pushed to follow suit. ‘[Multiple bundled systems would be] good for the market. It gives customers a choice of commercially available products,’ he added.”
