by Angela Guess
IBM has announced that its “Hadoop-based InfoSphere BigInsights distributed data-processing and analysis platform is available immediately as a service on the vendor’s SmartCloud Enterprise infrastructure… IBM introduced its InfoSphere BigInsights software in May. The software package includes a distribution of Apache Hadoop, the Pig programming language for MapReduce programming, connectors to IBM’s DB2 database, and IBM BigSheets, a browser-based, spreadsheet-metaphor interface for exploring data within Hadoop. Hadoop’s key appeals are scalability and flexibility to handle fast-growing and non-relational data such as social network comments, weather data, log files, genomic data, and even video.”
The article adds, “IBM’s move to support big data processing in the cloud comes just weeks after rivals Oracle and Microsoft took their first steps toward embracing Hadoop. Oracle announced in early October that it will introduce its own distribution of Apache Hadoop software, and on Monday it confirmed that an Oracle Big Data Appliance that will run the software will be available in the first quarter of 2012. Microsoft announced October 12 that it, too, will release an Apache Hadoop-based software distribution (expected some time in 2012, though no quarter was specified). It also announced it will launch a beta Hadoop service on its SQL Azure cloud computing platform before the end of this year.
photo credit: IBM
